2010 – where does it fit in the warmest year list?

1934 has long been considered the warmest year of the past century. A decade ago, the closest challenger appeared to be 1998, a super-el nino year, but it trailed 1934 by 0.54°C (0.97°F). Since then, NASA GISS has “adjusted” the U.S. data for 1934 downward and 1998 upward (see December 25, 2010 post by Ira Glickstein) in an attempt to make 1998 warmer than 1934 and seemingly erased the original rather large lead of 1934 over 1998. The last phases of the strong 2009-2010 el nino in early 2010 made this year another possible contender for the warmest year of the century. However, December 2010 has been one of the coldest Decembers in a century in many parts of the world, so 2010 probably won’t be warmer than 1998. But does it really matter? Regardless of which year wins the temperature adjustment battle, how significant will that be? To answer that question, we need to look at a much longer time frame‒centuries and millennia.

One of the best ways to look at long-term temperatures is with isotope data from the GISP2 Greenland ice core, from which temperatures for thousands of years can be determined. The ice core isotope data were obtained by Minze Stuiver and Peter Grootes from nuclear accelerator measurements of thousands of oxygen isotope ratios (16O/18O), which are a measure of paleo-temperatures at the time snow fell that was later converted to glacial ice. The age of such temperatures can be accurately measured from annual layers of accumulation of rock debris marking each summer’s melting of ice and concentration of rock debris on the glacier.

The past century

Two episodes of global warming and two episodes of global cooling occurred during the past century:

Figure 1. Two periods of global warming and two periods of global cooling since 1880

1880 to 1915 cool period. Atmospheric temperature measurements, glacier fluctuations, and oxygen isotope data from Greenland ice cores all record a cool period from about 1880 to about 1915. Many cold temperature records in North America were set during this period. Glaciers advanced, some nearly to terminal positions reached during the Little Ice Age about 400 years ago. During this period, global temperatures were about 0.9 ° C (1.6 ° F) cooler than at present. From 1880 to 1890, temperatures dropped 0.35 ° C (0.6° F) in only 10 years. The 1880 –1915 cool period shows up well in the oxygen isotope curve of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

1915 to 1945 warm period. Global temperatures rose steadily in the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s. By the mid-1940s, global temperatures were about 0.5 °C (0.9° F) warmer than they had been at the turn of the century. More high temperature records for the century were recorded in the 1930s than in any other decade of the 20th century. Glaciers during this warm period retreated, temperatures in the 1930s in Greenland were warmer than at present, and rates of warming were higher (warming 4°C (7° F) in two decades). All of this occurred before CO2 emissions began to soar after 1945, so at least half of the warming of the past century cannot have been caused by manmade CO2.

1945 to 1977 cool period. Global temperatures began to cool in the mid–1940’s at the point when CO2 emissions began to soar. Global temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere dropped about 0.5° C (0.9° F) from the mid-1940s until 1977 and temperatures globally cooled about 0.2° C (0.4° F). Many of the world’s glaciers advanced during this time and recovered a good deal of the ice lost during the 1915–1945 warm period. Many examples of glacial recession cited in the news media show contrasting terminal positions beginning with the maximum extent at the end of the 1880-1915 year cool period and ending with the minimum extent of the recent 20 year warm period (1977-1998). A much better gauge of the effect of climate on glaciers would be to compare glacier terminal positions between the ends of successive cool periods or the ends of successive warm periods.

1977 to 1998 global warming The global cooling that prevailed from ~1945 to 1977 ended abruptly in 1977 when the Pacific Ocean shifted from its cool mode to its warm mode in a single year and global temperatures began to rise, initiating two decades of global warming. This sudden reversal of climate in 1977 has been called the “Great Pacific Climate Shift” because it happened so abruptly. During this warm period, alpine glaciers retreated, Arctic sea ice diminished, melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet occur.

The abruptness of the shift in Pacific sea surface temperatures and corresponding change from global cooling to global warming in 1977 is highly significant and strongly suggests a cause-and-effect relationship. The rise of atmospheric CO2, which accelerated after 1945 shows no sudden change that could account for the “Great Pacific Climate Shift”.

1999 to 2010 global cooling. No global warming has occurred above the 1998 level and temperatures have declined slightly.

The past 500 years

Temperature oscillations recorded in Greenland ice cores over the past 500 years (Fig. 2) are truly remarkable. At least 40 periods of warming and cooling have occurred since 1480 AD, all well before CO2 emissions could have been a factor.

Most of the past 10,000 have been warmer than the present. Figure 4 shows temperatures from the GISP2 Greenland ice core. With the exception of a brief cool period about 8,200 years ago, the entire period from 1,500 to 10,500 years ago was significantly warmer than present.

Figure 4. Temperatures over the past 10,500 years recorded in the GISP2 Greenland ice core. (Modified from Cuffy and Clow, 1997)

Another graph of temperatures from the Greenland ice core for the past 10,000 years is shown in Figure 5. It shows essentially the same temperatures as Cuffy and Clow (1997) but with somewhat greater detail. What both of these temperature curves show is that virtually all of the past 10,000 years has been warmer than the present.

Figure 5. Temperatures over the past 10,000 years recorded in the GISP2 Greenland ice core - click to enlarge

So where do the 1934/1998/2010 warm years rank in the long-term list of warm years? Of the past 10,500 years, 9,100 were warmer than 1934/1998/2010. Thus, regardless of which year ( 1934, 1998, or 2010) turns out to be the warmest of the past century, that year will rank number 9,099 in the long-term list.

The climate has been warming slowly since the Little Ice Age (Fig. 5), but it has quite a ways to go yet before reaching the temperature levels that persisted for nearly all of the past 10,500 years.

Excellent post by Dr. Easterbrook. Anthony, can you invite him to post again — on his projections of the Earth’s climate for the next 2 decades or more? Those who have solid understanding of the past will have better grasp of giving intelligent forecast of the future.

While I agree with the overall theme about temperatures past, there are a couple of issues right at the start.

The first one is The age of such temperatures can be accurately measured from annual layers of accumulation of rock debris marking each summer’s melting of ice and concentration of rock debris on the glacier. How accurately are temperatures measured by the isotope ratio? Shouldn’t that be “estimated” rather than measured?

The second point relates to graph 1. It appears that you have used Hansen’s trick of making 1934 appear cooler, not just cooler than 1998, but even cooler than 1937 – 1939. Is there a data source for this graph? An incorrect graphic this early in the paper may turn people off from reading further.

Could SOMEONE explain how the O18 ratio can be used to measure TEMPERATURE?

Sorry, as an “old Nuke guy”, (with considerable isotopic and radiation background), I’m still FLUMOXED trying to figure this out.

The number of TROPICAL THUNDERSTORMS in coastal regions, controls that “enrichment” (this is by OBSERVATION, and there IS NO GOOD THEORETICAL REASON WHY known to DATE..)

So I regard the ratio as a good index of thunderstorm activity.

But of atmospheric energy? Of temperature? NO.

Thus, although it is TEMPTING to fall into this trap (as a “skeptic” of using these reconstructions), having made a judgement that they may be FICTICIOUS, I find myself being a skeptic of being a skeptic, on this basis!

I guess that makes me even more of a “climate agnostic”. (That’s OK, I prefer my DOGMA in religion, not “science”.)

COPENHAGEN, December 28, 2010 (AFP) – Authorities on the Baltic Danish island of Bornholm called for help to clear the roads on Tuesday as some of the island’s 43,000 snowed-in inhabitants are running short of fuel and medicine.

“You can’t even imagine how bad this is. The roads are closed, and they are digging and digging, and they just can’t get through,” said Helle Skov Olesen, who lives on the island nestled between Sweden and the northern coasts of Germany and Poland.

“They don’t even know where to put the snow,” she told daily Politiken.”

1934 has long been considered the warmest year of the past century. A decade ago, the closest challenger appeared to be 1998, a super-el nino year, but it trailed 1934 by 0.54°C (0.97°F).

Only in the US has 1934 ever been “considered the warmest year”. Globally 1998 is/was the warmest year. A number of bloggers posters still confuse US and global records, but this is sloppy from a prominent researcher.

1999 to 2010 global cooling. No global warming has occurred above the 1998 level and temperatures have declined slightly

Which dataset (UAH, RSS, GISS or HadCrut?) shows that Temperatures “have declined slightly” between 1999 and 2010. I know this “decline” fits with Don Easterbrook’s hypothesis but it just isn’t true.

Thank you Dr. Easterbrook, I am also a big believer in the power of the PDO driven by solar modulation. Interesting to see that the PDO even had some influence during the Maunder Minimum just as it did when we saw a century class high solar cycle around 1950.
The long term temperature graph does not look to allow for the recent temperatures but it matches up very nicely with the Holocene isotope record further strengthening the Sun/climate link. My research is complimentary to yours, click on my name to access my paper and research.

I have said it in other treads and will repeat it here. All these GISS people and most climate modelers and all climatologists are simply [getting significant mental pleasure from unlikely written fantasies] with a highly selective set of data. I know, because I have been one of them, that geologists have been trying to remind everyone of our history today back to the Pleistocene and before that. Obviously far to many have selective hearing and the selective understanding that accompanies it.

John Finn says:
December 28, 2010 at 6:21 pm
Which dataset (UAH, RSS, GISS or HadCrut?) shows that Temperatures “have declined slightly” between 1999 and 2010. I know this “decline” fits with Don Easterbrook’s hypothesis but it just isn’t true.

A comment on the notation on figure 1. “warming without CO2 increase”.
The CO2 concentration began to rise steeply from ~280 ppm around 1880……
…… while the steep climb in CO2 from fossil fuel use began 70 years later around 1950, when the concentration was already ~310 ppm…..

I’m confused. Is that first graph global temperatures or Greenland glacier temperatures?
========================================================

Given the recent focus on Greenland temps by our climatologists and their propensity to give significant weight to small areas, I’d say tomorrow they’d be one and the same. Related in anomalies, of course.

Max Hugoson says:
December 28, 2010 at 5:41 pmIt’s actually a proxy for Ice sheet volume..
The very link you showed further down also states:
“Temperature is also known to influence the δ18 O record; becoming more negative with warmer temperatures.”

Geoff Sharp says:
December 28, 2010 at 6:34 pmThe long term temperature graph does not look to allow for the recent temperatures but it matches up very nicely with the Holocene isotope record further strengthening the Sun/climate link.
Unfortunately the records do not match very nicely: http://www.leif.org/research/MisMatch-Geoff-Don.png

Your all wrong! The world is in fact warming, the snow and wintry conditions that you apparently see are only signs of the warming global temperatures, Your stealing all the perception from Africa! Yes you are! you are all evil and you hate Africans and Nazi Jews and polar bears.

Yes, John, he meant 1998 … quintessential cherry-picking – just like a Lindzen/Choi study – which makes his comment not very credible. The lack of understanding of what the “G” stands for in “GW” on display in this thread is stunning.

Okay. So returning from dinner I was able to get the image via the link provided by ~dbs. Thanks. Google Chrome still returns the “forbidden” message and Internet Explorer hangs and claims it can’t open that page. Compared to establishing a global temperature for thousands of years ago this ought to be a piece of cake. Maybe I’ll take the side off the computer and blow the dust out – That’s the equivalent of opening the hood of a car that won’t start and wiggling things. No help, but makes one feel better.

I’m a bit confused about your comment here—
1915 to 1945 warm period. Global temperatures rose steadily in the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s. By the mid-1940s, global temperatures were about 0.5 °C (0.9° F) warmer than they had been at the turn of the century. More high temperature records for the century were recorded in the 1930s than in any other decade of the 20th century. Glaciers during this warm period retreated, temperatures in the 1930s in Greenland were warmer than at present, and rates of warming were higher (warming 4°C (7° F) in two decades). All of this occurred before CO2 emissions began to soar after 1945, so at least half of the warming of the past century cannot have been caused by manmade CO2.
Shouldn’t the rates of warming be 0.4C/ 0.7F in 2 decades?

Also are the graphs attributed to Alley etc or are they drawn by yourself using his numbers or by some one else? Thank you.

Aside from not knowing what “global” means, does anyone have a comment about Earth’s orbital features over the periods discussed by Dr. Easterbrook? Milankovich Cycle? Holocene Climate Optimum? Impact on Greenland data?

1934, 1998 and 2010 have something else in common that I see by looking at the Smithsonian volcano eruptive history. A clear or recently cleared stratosphere and a troposphere with plenty of volcanic aerosols. A smoke filled greenhouse under the sun is just plain hotter than one with clean, clear air in it. Think about it.

Okay. So returning from dinner I was able to get the image via the link provided by ~dbs. Thanks. Google Chrome still returns the “forbidden” message and Internet Explorer hangs and claims it can’t open that page.

It probably has to do with where you are trying to load the page (ie business IP or consumer IP). I am at work and if I click on the link I get the “forbidden” error you talk about, but if I cut and past the original link into a new browser window (so it is not a re-direct from WUWT) the image loads just fine.

Thanks for letting Don put up a post. He usually gets disqualified since he has actually done things like ‘measurements’ and ‘field work’. And he has a track record of making forecasts which can be compared to the observed record.

Also of interest is how well these graphs seem to track with a lot of the material originally presented by HH Lamb in his book (Climate History of the World? Away from home and can’t reach for it right now, sorry).
Terry

Jantar wrote, “[…] graph 1. It appears that you have used Hansen’s trick of making 1934 appear cooler, not just cooler than 1998, but even cooler than 1937 – 1939. Is there a data source for this graph? An incorrect graphic this early in the paper may turn people off from reading further.”

FrankK wrote, “This post would be improved if Figures 1 and 2 were brought up to date. It will always gives some the impression that there is something to hide. Isn’t there any data beyond the years shown ??”

Floods, freeze not the end of global warming: CSIRO. Once more their ABC leads the chant – high temperatures mean climate change/global warming, cooler temperatures are just natural weather variability. So 2010 may or may not prove to be the warmest year in the last 100 years, why should that surprise. After all, wide spread temperature records started only about 100 years ago during a rising planetary temperature trend that commenced at the low point of the little ice age about 300 years ago. Clearly that was long before man made CO2 emissions could have influenced planetary temperature.
Also problematic for the man made warming hypothesis, observational evidence has invalidated the warming projections of the gaggle of grants financed climate models including that of CSIRO. During the last 10 – 15 years there has been no statistically significant planetary warming (a point agreed by Professor Phil Jones of “Climategate” fame) while during that same period man made CO2 emissions have continued unabated?

GRISP2 Ice Core drilling was completed in 1992.
What year is “the present” in its “before present” timeline(s)?

Figure 1. is biased. Atmospheric CO2 ppm (on year average) has been rising since at least 1900 AD, with no periods of “without change / without increase” since. While CO2 soared during the pre-1980 global cooling period, it ‘soared’ also and even more so during the warming period that followed, but the text just says “CO2 increase”, which makes it sound like it increased less than the previous period, which isn’t the case. In short: Fig. 1. is both biased and factually incorrect (a.k.a. bullshit).

Please state exact sources for any graph, and if possible where the data for a graph came from (especially when datasets are combined with different smoothing, etc. – we know how easily one can manipulate perceptions doing this).

For instance, it would be nice to know what “the present” is in Fig. 4. Is it 2000 AD in Figure 4? “Modified from Cuffy and Clow, 1997″… how modified? Were years of temperature data added after 1992, after 1997… after… when? If so, how many years and where did the other data (of an additional 8-18 years) come from?

Figure 5. at least shows that “the present” is 2000 AD, though it also doesn’t say where the additional 8+(?) temperature data came from, and at which point they’re grafted onto the ice core data. Or did they send the snow to the lab for isotope analysis as it fell since?

You wrote: “Figure 3 shows oxygen isotope ratios from the GISP2 Greenland ice core for the past 5,000 years. Note that temperatures were significantly warmer than present from 1500 to 5000 years ago.”

Than present? You’re talking about 2010! The timeline ends in 2000, and… -wuwt- the data actually end in… doesn’t say, but it looks like around 1850, not showing ANYTHING about the last century, let alone “the present”. Note THAT.

I’m a bit flummoxed. With a La Nina now, and also very weak period of solar activity for a few years, I expected global temperatures to be much cooler. But even if you just use uncontaminated satellite data (UAH MSU) and ignore Hansen, we’ve had a pretty warm year. I know that air temperature is a bad metric, and ocean heat content would be much better measure of global temperature, but still…

5. The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory has produced zero reproducible scientific data since its inscription, and should therefore be rejected. (The AGW theory is not science, it is an anti-science ideology, driven foremost of anti-human population control, manipulation, and socialism.)

Forgot to point out how nightmarishly BS your narrative for Fig. 5 is too.

You wrote: “Another graph of temperatures from the Greenland ice core for the past 10,000 years is shown in Figure 5. It shows essentially the same temperatures as Cuffy and Clow (1997) but with somewhat greater detail. What both of these temperature curves show is that virtually all of the past 10,000 years has been warmer than the present. [ Figure 5. Temperatures over the past 10,000 years recorded in the GISP2 Greenland ice core] So where do the 1934/1998/2010 warm years rank in the long-term list of warm years? Of the past 10,500 years, 9,100 were warmer than 1934/1998/2010. Thus, regardless of which year ( 1934, 1998, or 2010) turns out to be the warmest of the past century, that year will rank number 9,099 in the long-term list.”

Actually, the Fig 5 Graph is in ‘years before present (2000 AD)’, but it doesn’t end at zero years before present (THAT would be 2000), but at “95” (years before present), in other words the graph ends in 1905 AD. Nice work, Don! [sarc on] 1934, 1998, or 2010 are not even on the graph in Figure 5! The graph ends before we’d see the temperature surge of the modern warm period.

Nice premise, it needs an explanation on why isotope ratios are reliable temperature indicators (why should we belive them and not a single tree in Siberia or a half metric ton of coral or incidence of mcDonalds wrappers at each geological layer for that matter).
Also that first graph looks seriously shifty, measuring an 1890 temperature on an axis marked “global Temp deviation 1960-91″ makes my hackles rise, so does a text about how hot 1934 was when attached to a graph that dosn’t show it.

Hi moderator, combining my two comments (AWEFUL and WORSE THAN AWEFUL) into just one below this line, better organized by shredding every figure’s narrative in following order:
———————————————————-

SIMPLY AWEFUL

Figure 1. is biased. Atmospheric CO2 ppm (on year average) has been rising since at least 1900 AD, with no periods of “without change / without increase” since. While CO2 soared during the pre-1980 global cooling period, it ‘soared’ also and even more so during the warming period that followed, but the text just says “CO2 increase”, which makes it sound like it increased less than the previous period, which isn’t the case. In short: Fig. 1. is both biased and factually incorrect (a.k.a. [/SNIP]).

Figure. 2 indeed illustrates beautifully that “At least 40 periods of warming and cooling have occurred since 1480 AD, all well before CO2 emissions could have been a factor.”, but that’s another matter than 2010’s place on the temperature record. If temperatures were off the charts during any year since 1960 (like perhaps 1998, 2004 or 2010?), in comparison to the temperatures shown on this 480 year graph (what you call “500 years”), it doesn’t show. It ends in 1960.

Fig 3. “Figure 3 shows oxygen isotope ratios from the GISP2 Greenland ice core for the past 5,000 years. Note that temperatures were significantly warmer than present from 1500 to 5000 years ago.”
Um… “Warmer than present?? It is presently 2010, the year you’re talking about. Yet the timeline ends in 2000, and… -wuwt- the data actually end in… doesn’t say, but it looks like around 1850, not showing ANYTHING about the last century, let alone “the present”. Note THAT.

Fig 4. It would be nice to know what “the present” is in Fig. 4. Is it 1905 AD? 2000 AD? 1992? 1997? 2010? “Modified from Cuffy and Clow, 1997″ And IF years of data were added after 1992 (when GRISP2 Ice Core drilling was completed.), where did the other data (of who knows how many years) come from? Please state exact sources for any graph, and if possible where ALL the data for a graph came from (especially when datasets are combined with different smoothing, etc. – we know how easily one can manipulate perceptions doing this).

Figure 5. at least shows that “the present” is 2000 AD, though it also doesn’t say where the post-1992 temperature data came from, and at which point they’re grafted onto the ice core data. Oh wait… it’s much worse! The graph doesn’t end in 2000!!! For Figure 5., you wrote: “Another graph of temperatures from the Greenland ice core for the past 10,000 years is shown in Figure 5. It shows essentially the same temperatures as Cuffy and Clow (1997) but with somewhat greater detail. What both of these temperature curves show is that virtually all of the past 10,000 years has been warmer than the present. … So where do the 1934/1998/2010 warm years rank in the long-term list of warm years? Of the past 10,500 years, 9,100 were warmer than 1934/1998/2010. Thus, regardless of which year ( 1934, 1998, or 2010) turns out to be the warmest of the past century, that year will rank number 9,099 in the long-term list.”
–> The Figure 5 Graph, Dr., is in ‘years before present (2000 AD)’, but it doesn’t end at zero years before present (THAT would be 2000), but at “95″ (years before present), in other words the graph ends in 1905 AD. Nice work, Don! [sarc on] 1934, 1998, or 2010 are not even on this graph! The graph ends before we’d see the temperature surge of the modern warm period.

[/SNIP]. One of the worst science (?) postings I’ve seen here at WUWT.

The article confuses US temperatures (1934 vs 1998) vs global temps. More, the GISP ice core record ends in 1905. But the double-peaking modern warm period (with warm peaks in 1940 and 2005) is lower than the medieval or Roman warm period.

Concerning global temperatures, HadCRUT has several issues. First, the HadSST dataset has been artificially increased in 1998 by 0.1 °C, thus gaining 0.07 °C since (see Bob Tisdale blog). Second, the CRUTEM station record trend is estimated to be doubled because of UHI in 1993-2008 (McKittrick, Pielke, Spencer etc.). So the real difference between warm 40ties and 2000s is less than 0.4 °C what HadCRUT says today, maybe 0.2 °C.

The purpose of DR. Easterbrook’s essay is to look beyond recent temperature measurements and thus view climate as it should be seen – at the millennial and larger scale. Where the real patterns can be viewed and perhaps compared to solar and other phenomena that also occur on those scales.

He uses oxygen isotopes, as a proxy as have many others for analysis of anything to do with water. The isotope chemistry of water is reasonably well understood as are the variations in isotopic composition due to temperature and other factors.

The of oxygen isotopes as a temperature proxy is not without errors, but the errors and their sources are also reasonably well understood – unlike the errors associated with treemometers, particularly those treemometers from certain abnormal forms of coniferous trees found in harsh climates (i.e. split-bark bristlecombs in CA or stunted larch in Siberia).

What the Greenland ice core isotopes provide is a tool for identifying a pattern of climate change in Northern Hemisphere covering the last 10,000+ years. It shows, as Dr. Easterbrook has patiently been saying for many years, that climate change is normal, natural, and not particularly tied to anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

While the isotope data don’t pinpoint exact temperatures (no proxy that I know, not even alcohol in glass or electronic temperature proxies can do that), they do provide very good evidence that temperatures have fluctuated a great deal since the last ice age, with the Greenland ice core ones showing the greatest range (much like the arctic temperature amplification we have seen over the last 30 years and during the 1930’s and 40’s). And they also show that the current warming is not unique or special, and can be better described as really quite insignificant in comparison with other far more spectacular periods of warming.

We as individuals have the freedom of either believing Dr. Easterbrook’s essay as a reasonable interpretation of the data, or we can dismissing it as the senile ramblings of a retired scientist, as some in the climate alarmist business have done.

My own training as a geologist, with experience in glacial processes and isotope geochemistry, biases my own views and predisposes me to weigh in favor of Dr. Easterbrook.

I look forward to seeing him on the news after January, when Congress might ask his opinion on a few things of great importance.

MVB says: WORSE THAN AWEFUL [sic] Actually, the Fig 5 Graph is in ‘years before present (2000 AD)’, but it doesn’t end at zero years before present (THAT would be 2000), but at “95″ (years before present), in other words the graph ends in 1905 AD. Nice work, Don! [sarc on [sic] ] 1934, 1998, or 2010 are not even on the graph in Figure 5! The graph ends before we’d see the temperature surge of the modern warm period.

Not even up to nitpicking quality, MVB. See Figures 1 and 2 for the modern curves. The 1934, 98, 2010 data are extensively covered elsewhere. You probably don’t know that, because you’ve been spending all your time at porn sites.

Use of irrelevant graphs for the topic make this article total [/snip]:

– Figure 1. is erroneous and deceptive in its wording. Atmospheric CO2 ppm (on year average) has been rising since at least 1900 AD, with no periods of “without change / without increase” since. And temperature graphs that smoothened wouldn’t show record years anyhow.
– Figure. 2 has no bearing on 2010′s place on the temperature record since it ends in 1960. And it’s a 480 year graph , not 500 years.
– Fig 3. ‘s data end somewhere before 1900 AD (doesn’t even say), but in any case giving no information about the present, so comparison statements about any year since are worthless in.
– Fig 4. doesn’t state when its “present” is, either, but the arrow pointing at the “present temperature” appears to point at the coldest of the Little Ice Age.
– Fig. 5′ s data end in 1905 AD (95 years before present with the present at 2000 AD), making all you say about Fig 5’s implications absolute [/snip].

Seriously, no one else here having an issue with erasing almost the entire Modern Warm Period from a graph and adding “The climate … has quite a ways to go … before reaching the temperature levels that persisted for nearly all of the past 10,500 years.”???

I recently wrote to my Conservative (supposedly RW) MP to ask about their policy on climate change. I’d mentioned the failure of Copenhagen and this was part of the response.

“Although no legally binding deal was secured at Copenhagen I do not agree that other states are doing nothing. As we continue to seek global agreements, there is rapid action in China and Japan. In the USA where prospects of early cap and trade legislation are slim, the US Government plans to push businesses hard through the EPA.”

It doesn’t matter what skeptics find in articles like this, the outcome is already settled.

don,t worry about the graph being up to date, just put your head out the window ,you will soon know the temp at that time and date you put your head out the window, if you are a greeny you will not know what date it is or time you put your head out of the window ????

What baffles me is that after all these DECADES they suddenly feel the need to ‘adjust’ 1934 downward while ‘adjusting’ 1998 upward. Can’t the agency that sent man to the moon read a thermometer? We here on WUWT know the crap these people are up to but the vast public don’t have a clue they are being tricked.

jorgekafkazar says:
December 29, 2010 at 12:18 am
Not even up to nitpicking quality, MVB. See Figures 1 and 2 for the modern curves.

You’re wrong, jorgekafkazar. Fig 1. isn’t calibrated to the other graphs, so comparing it to the rest of the Holocene doesn’t fly. And Dr. Don J. Easterbrook’s narrative, such as for Fig 5., implies a ‘present’ that is not on the graph he’s talking about.

And 1934 was an American record, not a global one; ’98 and el nino year, 2004 not mentioned here, and the data for 2010 isn’t actually in yet. [SNIP what I’d like to call you.] I’m familiar with the information. I just find it ‘a shame’ [if that’s still an okay word to use] when an article drops to similarly low standards as those that are constantly critiqued here.

It is clear from the graphs presented that the climate of Greenland is not representative of other parts of the world, notably Europe. This is seen totally clearly by the fact that the ‘Little Ice Age’ temperatures in Greenland were higher than in the late 19th century.

It is extremely stupid to try and correlate one place’s data with ‘global trends’. The only thing this data represents is the history of Greenland which, as we know, shows an inverse correlation in general with Western Europe.

I don’t think this argument has any more merit than those of the warmers and I suggest that both sides stop their grandstanding and return to doing science properly.

It is always good to have a rant from someone like MVB, as it serves to remind us all exactly what alarmist ‘logic’ is all about.

The fact that GISS has grossly manipulated historic temperature data is completely irrelevant, so is the fact that most of this inter-glacial period has been warmer than now. AGW cult members have been taught that because “grants are good”, then anything from Mannian maths to distorted science is also good.

It is possible a very inconvenient truth is now occurring for those trumpeting that “2010 is the warmest year ever”. The global temperature anomaly -as measured by satellites -has been decreasing over the past few months. In the last couple of days it has started to plunge:

Ed Murphy,
You say that a smoke filled greenhouse is warmer than one with clear air.
Has anyone done the experiment to find out if a greenhouse with 2,000ppm CO2 is warmer than one with 400ppm, everything else being equal?
Or is that not relevant?

Chris says: I’m a bit flummoxed. With a La Nina now, and also very weak period of solar activity for a few years, I expected global temperatures to be much cooler. But even if you just use uncontaminated satellite data (UAH MSU) and ignore Hansen, we’ve had a pretty warm year. I know that air temperature is a bad metric, and ocean heat content would be much better measure of global temperature, but still…

What gives?

The problem is that we can’t really measure the “Average temperature” of the planet very well for several rather well understood but consistently ignored fundamental reasons.

The first, and most basic, involves some math that most folks don’t know. The math of fractals. Fractals are all around us and involved in a huge number of common things, but most folks just think they are pretty pictures like Mandelbrots. But mountains are fractile as are coastlines.

The only correct answer is “It depends on the length ruler you use when measuring”.

Mountains are fractal as well. As are many (most all?) natural surfaces. So it ought to come as no surprise that temperatures of those surfaces have fractal properties as well. I’ve measured a 30 F or so difference between my back porch and fence on a rainy day. Where you measure determins the answer you get.

Then GISS and UEA and others spend loads of hours turning all this into homogenized data cheese food product. That does NOT improve it.

OK, the land data are sucky. So go with the sats…

Except the surface is still fractal, the IR emissions are widely variable, and now you are measuring different stuff. IMHO, the reason they are still reading high while land has gone low is heat flow

Heat is leaving the planet. Fast.

The uv level has dropped, the air thickness has shrunk, we’ve not had sats watching during this kind of thing, and it’s flummoxed THEM. They are seeing the cloud TOPS and those are warm as that’s where the heat is being DUMPED as it leaves the planet. This will take about a decade to get the oceans cold and during that time the oceans will continue to drop while the tops of the clouds keep announcing “more heat to leave the planet today, nice and warm”. The basic problem here is that HEAT is not TEMPERATURE but everyone measures temperature and pretends it’s heat. Just wrong.

So, what’s a person to do?

In my opinion there are two things you can reasonably do. Find long lived thermometers that have not changed and are still being recorded. Look at them. Now you are not changing the size of your ruler as you measure the fractal. When they are looked at, they show cooling. Slight, but present. The other thing you can do is watch the snows and rains. Clouds convect heat to their tops, then dump it to space when the water condenses (or hail and snow freeze) and it falls back to earth. As the rains fall and snow accumulates, you can count every drop has “HEAT left the planet”. If that count goes up, we’re cooling. Over the last 30 years we heard a lot about AGW induced droughts. I think that properly causality runs the other way. Something (probably high solar UV output or few clouds ala Svensmark) caused lower precipitation, that then meant less heat left, that results (eventually) in higher temperatures. Now we’ve got less solar output (less UV and thinner atmosphere, and / or more clouds) and we’re getting more precipitation. That’s heat leaving (makeing warm cloud TOPS in the process). Eventually the land will show lower temps everywhere, but for now it’s mostly just under the precipitation areas (i.e. the N.H. snows and Australian rains) and some years after that, the sats will catch up as heat transport reduces and clouds cool off.

This GEOS sat picture has a nice color indication of a warm cloud top. The green splotch over N. America:

I’m under the rain from that cloud and it’s cold down here underneath. Rain and cloud radar from below here:

so you can see what it’s like from below where I can personally tell you it has been cold and wet all day. That article also includes a very cold sea surface chart / graph as seen from space. It is cold UNDER that “warm cloud top” (thats how that color is described in the legend to that picture in this article):

which also covers a bit about the daily nature of heat flow off the planet and into warm cloud tops on the way to space.

Yes, this description is somewhat ‘speculative’ in that I can’t cite a reference for each bit of it. I’ve not “done the foot notes”. But all the parts are there for you to see. The GEOS sat seeing a “warm cloud top”. The cold rain below. The patterns of heat flow off planet via convection and condensation releasing heat. The basic physics of the whole thing.

So yes, it’s a bit speculative to say that the temperature reporting would do things the same way GEOS does and be fooled by cloud tops. Then again, they do measure higher in the air than “land surface” …

If I remember correctly there are three primary isotopes of Oxygen being O16, O17 and O18. Of these O16 is the most common. The three isotopes behave almost identically in terms of their chemistry, almost being the important rider here. Water that incorporates O18 or O17 is heavier than water that incorporates O16. When water evaporates from any surface (land, plants, lakes, rivers etc) the molecules containing the lighter isotope tend (slightly) to preferentially end up in the resulting vapour. When water condenses from vapour it is the molecules containing the heavier isotope that tend (slightly) to preferentially end up in droplet form (rain, hail, snow).

The result is that oceans become enriched in O18 relative to precipitation.
Rain falling on coastal areas is enriched in O18 relative to rain in continental interiors.
Precipitation on an ice sheet at low elevation is enriched O18 relative nearby areas at higher elevation.

As total ice volume increases worldwide during an ice age the ocean becomes more enriched in O18 because the growing land-based ice tends to be relatively rich in O16.

As an ice sheet expands in basal area, water has to travel further to get to the central region, so with time the O18 content of precipitation (mainly snow) here is expected to decrease. As the elevation of the ice increases the O18 content of new precipitation also decreases. O18 tends to drop out in the “first squeeze” leaving the O16 to precipitate out later.

But on top of elevation, distance and time factors the O18 content of precipitation is also a function of the temperature of precipitation. The O18 tends to drop out of water vapour at a warmer temperature than the O16 or O17.

So the basic answer to your question, when stripped back to bare essentials, is that O18 is easier to precipitate than O17 or O16.

Please note that unlike most of climate science, the essential behaviour of the isotopes of oxygen is well established science. It has been thus for decades. The known behaviour of isotopes of oxyen has been a tool for physicists, chemists, geochemists, archaeologists, oceanographers, palaenotologists and others for decades. There is a substantial literature available on the geochemistry of the isotopes of oxygen. There is a vast literature available on the isotopic ratios of a varaiety of marine microfossils. These fossilised ratios, measured from ocean floor cores painstakingly centimetre by centimetre reveal the changes in the volume of both the oceans and the ice sheets in great detail. Similarly the isotopic ratios measured directly from ice-core samples reveal the temperature of precipitation, so long as the distance from the nearby oceanic evaporative source is known and so long as the altitude of precipitation is known. Naturally some estimation is required as the ice may move from its original altitude, and there may have been a wide evaporative source area, with varying surface conditions. So numerous ice cores and pits, both deep and shallow, have been undertaken to get a good handle on the important variables. Within realistic error bands the raw results are reasonably convincing. Similarly the isotopic signature of rivers, lakes, streams and groundwater has recieved considerable attention. The modern and ancient isotopic signature of oceanic water has also been investigated in detail, both surface water, intermediate water and bottom water (based on fossilized planktonic organisms and sea-floor dwelling organisms). Cyclical changes in the ratio of oxygen isotopes in seawater has been tied conclusively to cycles in the obliquity and precession of the earths spin axis and somewhat more arguably to the eccentricity of the earths orbit around the sun. This is the major line of evidence connecting long-term climate fluctuation to orbital-scale mechanics.

I agree with the basic premise of the article – i.e. that the ‘warmest year’ title is somewhat irrelevant and also, that it is demonstrably so. Even allowing for errors in the ice cores, tree rings, NH and SH variations, etc, etc – it (palaeoclimatology) still all points to one thing – climate has and will continue to vary, by quite large amounts – lets say +/- 5deg C – and ALL without any anthgropogenic influence ! (I am assuming that folk aren’t going to believe that aliens came in the past and burnt fossil fuels! )

While we all appear to be arguing the toss over GISSes, HADCruts, Graphs and things, has nobody, but nobody noticed that the IPCC definition of GHG Forcing flux does NOT comply with the laws of thermodynamics? Surely a flux which crosses a boundary between two systems without a ‘Change of State’ occurring in the recipient system is just nonsense? This sort of flux wouldn’t even boil a kettle let alone warm up the planet.
This has created great confusion with me as I am quite unable to follow the logic of the IPCC thereafter.
For instance: Where do I put this IPCC Forcing Flux [IPCCFF] into the Stefan-Boltzmann equation? After all, this, I understand, is used as a basis for the calculation of the temperature of all the heavenly bodies; is it not? Putting it in as an addition to Insolation offends my intuition; so where? This could perhaps be called the ‘Stefan Anomaly’
Secondly I have grave doubts about the way the Arrhenius derivative equation has been used. Implicit in this equation is the ‘All things being equal’ assumption, which is manifestly untrue; and it further suffers from ‘Argument from the particular to the general’.
Thirdly I find that the IPCC treatment of the Bode equation does NOT concur with engineering textbooks on feedback control design. However I am no expert in that field; but merely note that when the graph is plotted for various feedback parameters, using IPCC figures, it results in a totally unstable situation where, if applied to our climate would have resulted in the planet blowing up a couple of times in past history.
If, as I suspect, the IPCC logical route is so flawed then why do we not deal with this instead of looking at the trees instead of the wood?
Would it not be preferable to define the GHG effect in terms of ‘Change of State’, rather than as a flux?
Meanwhile I remain in contempt of the IPCC stance; but would dearly like to have the opinion of others on these matters.

Paul, you may be right. I seem to recall shortly after the initial Y2K error was pointed out to GISS that the global temp for 1934 was only 0.14 C lower than the USA temp. However I have been unable to find that data now, so maybe my memory is incorrect on that point.

The first is in establishing the accuracy of this method of estimated temperatures from very old ice samples.

The second problem is in establishing how much the instrumental global indexes are contaminated by the UHI effect at the different locations from which the indexes are drawn and whether there are other systematic errors in these indexes, as some critics suggest.

I have found a great disparity in the rate of temperature change between global indices and certain widely disbursed individual Australian locations after adjusting for UHI (which I have been able to identify specifically). After adjustment for UHI, there is no trend in temperature over periods well in excess of 100 years. Yes I know, Australia only occupies a tiny part of the globe, but isn’t it strange that more and more individual locations in different countries and continents show the same pattern?

So I think that we all need to keep quite calm with clear heads and examine what happens in the next few years, before being absolutely, definitely sure that the earth is about to burn up (AGW) or turn into one giant deep freezer (sunspot minimum).

Now like everybody else reading this blog, I have a definite view on these matters. But in evaluating evidence we must strive to keep an open mind.

The temperature is either going up or down or staying much the same. We certainly do live in interesting times as the direction will very likely soon become obvious and at least half of us will be wrong.
Let’s hope when that comes we have the guts to acknowledge the truth.

The global cooling that prevailed from ~1945 to 1977 ended abruptly in 1977 when the Pacific Ocean shifted from its cool mode to its warm mode in a single year and global temperatures began to rise, initiating two decades of global warming.

Professor Easterbrook
Current state of understanding is that causes of PDO and AMO are not known.
I think there may be a plausible cause to both.
According to my research the PDO driver reached minimum in 1973
1969 – 19
1970 – 17
1971 – 17
1972 – 15
1973 – 12
1974 – 14
1975 – 17
1976 – 17
1977 – 17
1978 – 19
1979 – 20
1980 – 25
1981 – 28
1982 – 30
Change took some 4 years (ref. your date of 1977) to propagate across Pacific. Similar minimum value (11) was previously recorded in 1942, and has not reoccurred since 1973. Although PDO is de-trended, there is a gradient to the driver as in y = 0.172x for 1860-2010.
For more details see:http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NPG.htmhttp://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NAP-AMO.htm
Any comment welcome.

John Finn says:
December 28, 2010 at 6:21 pm
Which dataset (UAH, RSS, GISS or HadCrut?) shows that Temperatures “have declined slightly” between 1999 and 2010. I know this “decline” fits with Don Easterbrook’s hypothesis but it just isn’t true.

Has anyone measured the Ar/N2 ratio in the ice cores?
Keelings Ar/N2 data is rather interesting and appears to act as a signal for ocean heating. The difference in the temperature dependent partition coefficients of Ar and N2 between the atmosphere and the oceans may be a better temperature proxy that oxygen ratios.

Just to be sure everyone understands the graphs they’re seeing.
The first one purports to show two periods each of cooling and warming over the past century. Two things. First, it stops in 2000, so does not capture the 0.18 degree C rise since then. Second, the two “cooling” periods are actually closer to neutral (temps stayed the same in one, and went down 0.1 degree in the other). In contrast, the “warming” periods saw serious temp increases. Hence, the overall trend remains warm >> we’re warming during warming periods a lot more than we’re cooling during cooling periods.

The second graph stops in the mid-1900s, therefore omitting the near one degree rise since. It does not have a reference, and appears to be based on the now debunked Loehle reconstruction.

The third graph stops even earlier, it looks like around 1900, completely omitting the temp increase of the past century.

The fourth graph is based on a 1997 paper by Coffey (not “Coffy”) and Clow. Although the author labels the base line as present temp, C&C actually defined “present” as 1950 in their paper. So this graph again fails to capture recent warming. This is also a graph solely of ice core data, recording temps high up on the summit of the Greenland ice sheet. It is not a depiction of global temps.

The 5th graph from Alley is also cherry-picked. That article was considering solely the Greenland ice core data in order to analyze the Younger Dryas cold period, which occurred 12-13,000 years ago. Here’s a link to the abstract and the key graph: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/alley2000/alley2000.html. Yet the graph here stops some 10,000 years ago. More important, THE MOST RECENT DATA POINT IN THE ALLEY GRAPH IS 1905!! Again, the author is ignoring the last 105 years of warming (and he’s doing so in a deceptive way by labelling the last data points as the “present”).

None of the graphs show anything like the author wants you to believe, and provide very little insight into current temps.

Stevo says:
December 29, 2010 at 3:55 am
To say “1934 has long been considered the warmest year of the past century” without understanding that this refers to the US only is unforgivably ignorant.

Either “ignorant” or misleading. That apart, I think there are problems with the Easterbrook prediction of Cooling. For what it’s worth I do believe in cycles (PDO, AMO AO etc) and it’s quite possible that we have entered a “cool phase” of the PDO as Don suggests. However, if you look closely at Figure 1 it’s clear that the ‘cooling’ takes place in the first decade of the shift. See ~1880 and ~1943. There is very little cooling after, say, 1890 or 1953. If, as Don Easterbrook suggests, the shift began in 1999 we may have already had all the ‘cooling’ there is – which simply amounts to a lack of significant warming (The UAH trend since Jan 1998 is positive).

Perhaps the increase in GHGs is amplifying the warming phase while effectively negating the cooling phase. Just a thought. However, I doubt things are as simple as all that which is why we should treat these posts (even anti-AGW ones) with total scepticism.

A good wrap by “chiefio” that describes the heat flow that is currently occurring. This can be seen on Dr. Spencer’s blog where satellite temperatures are taken at different levels. The current sea level graphs are showing a sharp decline in temperature which is not showing yet in the higher atmosphere records.

Steven Mosher:
I am generally a fan of your science and I think you do a great job at doing what you do for instance, however, I think your questions are mis-placed. I think overall you put too much faith in so-called climate scientists and too much faith in their methodology. I am not a person to say that CO2 does not warm up the Earth and I do believe humans do have an impact on the Earth which we should strive to minimize as much as possible. After that, I think global warming or cooling is nothing more then a long-term weather forecasting method. It should never be used to advocate policy.

But to answer a couple of your points:
1. The temperature reconstruction of greenland needs error bars.
This is very true. It would help to have this information. Although unless they are huge I don’t think it would change this century’s status as a rather cool century.

2. Folks who moan about the “existence” of a global average should moan now.
This is not a global average though. Its just Greenland as you say in the next point…But if we are figuring out climate or long-term weather averaged out over a long-term, heck global average temp. might be as good of a way as any. Guess I agree with you on that one…

3. Greenland is not the world. If you want to characterize the whole world by one spot then take it up with the people who complain that 7000 stations is not enough.

Very true. But as GISS shows, greenland being warm means that a good portion of the world map becomes red suddenly. I am not one to say that Greenland is either good or bad as a place to measure global temperature, but if you put any stock of faith in GISS (which I admit you do not….then this might be a starting point of some sort.) Greenland’s temperature versus the rest of the world might be a better comparison with our known temperature records. I think that might be the better question here regarding assumption of Greenland being the entire world.

1. What’s our best estimate of the temp over the next 100 years.
Barring any major changes in solar output etcetc, probably a warming of .7 – 1 degrees like the previous century. I put in .3 as possible for CO2 increases. Biosphere might just take care of a lot of it, I think its something to think about anyway. Regardless, this is something we could argue about, and it would be rather fruit-less as this is nothing more then “an educated guess” with some being more educated then others.

These 2 questions are political, and are not scientific whatsoever…

2. Can we do anything about it
Yes. Depends on what your political ambitions are. We could go entirely carbon free for the most part except the air we breathe without ruining society with wind-mills. Nuclear plants and electrical cars all around, combined with very limited air travel and you have it done. This is a political question though….so its opinion based.

3. should we, if we can.
I think Nuclear is a good option. For one, its just as cheap as any other power source and two we should strive to minimize our impact no matter what it might be. Electrical cars are something that we can think about after nukes are online, I don’t subscribe to peak oil, but it would be nice to have oil and petroleum around for stuff that we make out of it instead of using for fuel.

On December 29, 2010 at 1:43 am, Peter Miller said: “It is always good to have a rant from someone like MVB, as it serves to remind us all exactly what alarmist ‘logic’ is all about.”

No clue what you mean by that. In my opinion, CAGW alarmists lack both logic and integrity. But my critiques were about the posted article (“2010 – where does it fit in the warmest year list? 12/28/2010 by Don J. Easterbrook), IN AND OF ITSELF. I do not disagree with the conclusion (that 2010 the warmest (even if it were so, which is unlikely) is much ado about nothing, because we have evidence that it has been similarly warm or significantly warmer during most of the last 10,000 yrs (not to mention how much warmer it was at climatic optimums in previous interglacials; also all without AGW), but I do not see a way to scientifically arrive at the conclusion from what is presented in the article above. The Fig 1 Temp graph is not calibrated to the proxy graphs for even a basic visual comparison to be made. For starters, the last 10 decades are not even on ANY of the graphs Dr. Easterbrook chose to debunk the fuss about 2010 warmth. I take issue with comparing differently smoothened datasets, comparing measured Temps and proxies, and comparing local estimates based on proxies with the estimates of ‘global average temperature’ (and the enormous uncertainties that comes with). Not putting these sorts of issues in context, or -as is the case in the article- not even mentioning these issues, I find deceptive. Two periods supposedly on a graph being compared to each other when one of the discussed periods isn’t actually on the graph is hitting a low. Just admit it.

But – for the conclusion itself- in Fig. 5: IF recent measurements were incorporated I would expect the last decade to be akin to the peak of the MWP, but – for that location where GISP2 data were collected – who knows? GISP2 was drilled at 72 36′ N, 38 30′ W, and when you look at the temperature anomaly maps….: for that particular spot both NASA GISS and NASA MODIS pretty much say the same: a value close to or slightly cooler than to the 1951-1980 mean. In other words: even if the Fig. 5 graph extended all the way to today, it’s clear that 2010 could not beat warm periods such as Roman or Minoan Warm Periods (let alone the likely peak years within those periods).

If months or even a year jump out as warmer (or cooler) in sattelite-era measurement records, then it would be helpful to show THOSE corresponding graphs, and NOT graphs on which such recent extremes are neither shown, nor comparable to the obviously smoothened proxy data, which even if similar extremes happened in included years, they wouldn’t show up.

And, as far as Peter Miller’s comment that “GISS has grossly manipulated historic temperature data is completely irrelevant”, I disagree with as well. One can make the point using paleoclimatology, but if science wasn’t being manipulated for political agenda’s, one may not even need to look so far back to illustrate the record-breaking nonsense, that is being used to “proof” AGW dogma.

“the fact that most of this inter-glacial period has been warmer than now” is not irrelevant either. It’s very relevant to the science and it does debunk the “warmest ever” nonsense well. But that “AGW cult members have been taught that because “grants are good”, then anything from Mannian maths to distorted science is also good.”, THAT is an opinion that has absolutely nothing to do with the actual science (even though it may be true; it with be more fitting in a sociology thread perhaps.). Trumpeting some global average temperature decrease over the past few months (or days – gimme a break) is as ridiculous as trumpeting the first half of 2010 (or 2010 itself – who cares) as being oh-so-unusually warm.

In about 5 years we’ll already have a much better idea how significant the effect of the most recent ocean current changes and cosmic ray influx changes are on global climates. I doubt keeping all cars running 24/7 would make a difference to keep the wrath of global cooling at bay.

For what it’s worth I do believe in cycles (PDO, AMO AO etc) and it’s quite possible that we have entered a “cool phase” of the PDO as Don suggests. However, if you look closely at Figure 1 it’s clear that the ‘cooling’ takes place in the first decade of the shift. See ~1880 and ~1943. There is very little cooling after, say, 1890 or 1953. If, as Don Easterbrook suggests, the shift began in 1999 we may have already had all the ‘cooling’ there is

A strange comment….looking at the shift in the PDO at 1945 (which was during high solar activity) we can see a gradual decline in temperatures that deepened towards the late 70’s. Later in the PDO cycle the solar output dropped dramatically and the AMO also went negative to provide the perfect storm which brought the science world to a “next ice age” situation. The current situation is very close to the same scenario but this time the solar output will be greatly sustained. I don’t think you have a grasp on what controls climate.

Where is peer review when you need it? This post conflates the global climate record with regional records for the US and Greenland. Then it fails to point out that “present” only goes up to 1905. Over the last 21 years, I have been the editor or reviewer for over 600 manuscripts submited for publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals (I need to keep a record for my employer). I have to say that I have never seen a submitted manuscript with such blatant errors as in this post. Even submitting a manuscript such as this would be damaging to one’s career and would certainly cause the loss of all credibility with the journal’s editor and the reviewers if any (In most cases the editor peruses a manuscript to check it’s suitability for the journal and to decide on expert reviewers. These kinds of errors and misleading comparisons would almost certainly lead to rejection by the editor, without even sending the ms. out to reviewers).

[This is a BLOG rather than a science journal. Though some entries may contain errors at least here they are not hidden. … bl57~mod]

John Finn says:
December 28, 2010 at 6:21 pm
Which dataset (UAH, RSS, GISS or HadCrut?) shows that Temperatures “have declined slightly” between 1999 and 2010. I know this “decline” fits with Don Easterbrook’s hypothesis but it just isn’t true.

CO2 was on a steady rise during those time periods and because of the logarithmic nature of CO2’s LWIR absorption curve the early period increases, while being smaller in absolute ppm measure, have the same effect as the later period increases of larger absolute magnitude.

That’s an amateurish error, doctor, and reveals a large gap in your knowledge of this subject area.

The pro-AGW’ers hate it when real data is presented. It brings out an emotional reaction in them (see MVB above). They would prefer it if no actual data is presented and that we just continue on perpetuating the myth that today’s temperatures are the warmest ever.

Well, they are not.

No matter how angry that makes one. But that is an emotional reaction versus a factual data-based reaction.

The d018 isotopes are the best temperature proxy we have. It has been proven in hundreds of examples to reasonably reflect the temperature of the time. And this goes back hundred of millions of years. It might not be perfect, but it is the best proxy we have got.

It needs to be properly calibrated to the location however. The isotope change per 1C temperature change varies with the latitude, altitude, and proximity to the ocean. The fact that they also vary with ice volume means it does accurately reflect the general temperature of the time. More ice, the colder Earth has been. Rather straightforward in my opinion versus a reason to question it.

The Greenland GISP2 isotopes, however, have not been calibrated properly to date (including by Richard Alley) to the latitude and altitude they were laid down. Hence, Dr. Easterbrook using just the isotope numbers for the most part versus the temperature implied by them.

[This is a BLOG rather than a science journal. Though some entries may contain errors at least here they are not hidden. … bl57~mod]

Of course I know that this blog is not a science journal. However, the inference is that focusing on a few graphs from journal articles that are presented in a misleading and confusing way somehow trumps the work of hundreds of journal articles.

Note that RB Alley, whose data are cited in this post is a noted and senior “warming” professor at Penn State. No doubt he had something to do with bringing that fast rising star, Michael Mann, to his department. If I were “editor” for this posting by Easterbrook, I would have sent it to Alley to ask for his comments on the interpretation of his data. Recently Alley has testified before the US Congress on the threat of rapid warming caused by human activities. Somehow, I expect that he would be very surprised that his data could be interpreted to show that Greenland has been warmer than present over most of the last 10,000 years. People here should be more skeptical about how Easterbrook has replotted Alley’s data. Since Easterbrook is a professor of geology, he should try to publish these new intrepretations in a scientific journal. If accepted, they would certainly attract a lot of scientific interest and acclaim.

I like your reply. I’m pretty much in agreement with it. Near as I can tell there is a steady 0.5C rise in temperature, on average around the world, during the industrial era on top of which rides variations of +- 1.0C. The 0.5C rise correlates well with a calculated rise of 1.1C per CO2 doubling. That is the low end of the IPCC estimate for climate sensitivity to CO2 doubling. The flaw in CAGW ointment isn’t the warming caused by CO2 alone which appears to be well supported in the observations (measured temperatures and CO2 content of the atmosphere) and is consistent with what the basic physics predicts should be observed. The flaw in the CAGW is the so-called “amplification” i.e. a 1 degree rise from CO2 causing an additional 2 degree rise from increased water vapor. That amplification is entirely fictional and not at all supported by observations. This is a fatal flaw for CAGW as it removes the “C” from CAGW turning catastrophic warming essentially into beneficial warming so long as the warming is predominantly at higher latitudes during the nights and winters which in effect merely lengthens the growing seasons where such lengthening is a great boon to the biosphere in general and agriculture in particular.

I’m no AGW skeptic I’m a CAGW skeptic. My position is best described as BAGW – Beneficial Anthropogenic Global Warming. I expect the benefits to continue until there’s no longer enough fossil fuel left to keep it going and therein lies the heart of the problem – what do we do when the fossil fuel reserves are used up? There’s enough to keep going for a century or maybe two at most then the proverbial shit is going to hit the fan. We need a less expensive, abundant, sustainable source of energy in place. The sun is ultimately that source. We need a means to harvest it and I have every confidence that technologic progress will meet that challenge in a timely manner without draconian conservation measures, without massive changes in infrastructure away from liquid hydrocarbon transportation fuels, and in general without great inconvenience or disruption in the way we live. The future is bright and while the landscape might be further defaced by more apartment buildings it won’t be defaced by wind turbines which IMO are a boondoggle only exceeded by diversion of corn meal from food products into ethanol fuel production.

It would be nice if the scientists would remember that in their articles posted to WUWT they are not just writing to their fellow scientists but are helping us layman get up to speed. I am griping about the charts. They are easy to understand unless you don’t understand the the measurements being depicted. It is the little details. For example -31.50c is what, the average temperature of the planet? Triangle O18 o/oo means? The assumption of prior knowledge of the reader often results in a failure to communicate. Usually it would only take a sentence to explain the less than obvious.

[Reply: 0/00 is per mille, or a tenth of a percent; one part in a thousand. O18 is an oxygen isotope. Triangle (∆) means change, and is usually called delta, such as ∆T = change in temperature. –31.5°C refers to the temperature at a location such as Vostok Antarctica, or Greenland. It is not the average planetary temperature, but the changes show whether the planet was in a warming or cooling trend at the time, such as the MWP or LIA. ~dbs, mod.]

The new guest author program, which include myself as one of those new guest authors, appears to have fostered a greater need for internal peer review before the articles are published. Anthony and Willis and guest authors like Spencer and Lindzen didn’t seem to need much in the way of peer review but with this new influx of guest authors the comments are now stuffed with repetitious exposure of errors in the articles.

A call for volunteers to do basic fact checking of article drafts prior to publication might be in order. A great example of what wouldn’t make it into print is the erroneous labels attached to figure 1 claiming no increases in CO2 from 1880-1940. CO2 did indeed increase during those periods according to the best available observations and the logarithmic LWIR absorption curve of CO2 (which is basic physics first demonstrated experimentally 150 years ago) makes those early industrial period increases every bit as effective as the increases from 1940-2010.

When looking at temperature graphs covering thousands of years you must remember the changes in Earth obliquity and eccentricity and the resultant surface insolation differences. My understanding is that currently both obliquity and eccentricity are declining which will take us back into a long glacial period. In that light, shouldn’t we be encouraging anything we may be able to do that will help keep the the planet warmer?

“The sad fact is after continued growth of CO2 output the temperature record is still fixed at 1998. Why is it not climbing as the AGW models predicted?”

Yeah, it’s a travesty alright. The problem is that the CO2 driven surface warming is only ~1.0C per CO2 doubling and it’s lost in the noise of much larger non-anthropogenic variations. It’s no travesty at all if the CAGW boffins would simply admit that water-vapor amplification of CO2-driven warming is a narrative fiction that does not exist in the real world.

I took a look at the RB Alley paper that is the basis of important conclusions of this posting. The article is about rapid changes in climate in Greenland during the Dryas warming, that occured over 10,000 years ago. Evidently, Easterbrook some how plotted data from this study and spliced on what he considers comparable data for recent times.

In order for anyone to assess the appropriateness of his analysis, he would need to provide much more information on his methods. Since his conclusions are seemingly completely unrelated to those of the author of the study, it is really important that Easterbrook provide enough of his methods so that they could be repeated. The fact this his reasults disagree with all of the published record makes this more important. In a scientific analysis it is also important to cite contrary data and to explain why the current analysis is more valid.

The paper being cited is from 2000. Surely, if this paper by a prominant scientist with a “pro warming” record is contrary to other more recent studies, climate scientists would have resolved the issue by now. The author’s main conclusions focus on the potential for “rapid climate change” and have no direct comparisons with recent climate.

In my view, this posting by Easterbrook completely lacks credibility and transparency. The main characteristic of a skeptical scientist is that he or she considers the data carefully, whether the conclusions agree or disagree with his or her world view. As a scientist, I am just as likely to call for the rejection of a paper that generally supports my own view as I am to call for the rejection of a paper contrary to my view of the evidence. The credibility of the support of conclusions by the presented data is the main criterion for assessing a scientific analysis.

For what it’s worth I do believe in cycles (PDO, AMO AO etc) and it’s quite possible that we have entered a “cool phase” of the PDO as Don suggests. However, if you look closely at Figure 1 it’s clear that the ‘cooling’ takes place in the first decade of the shift. See ~1880 and ~1943. There is very little cooling after, say, 1890 or 1953. If, as Don Easterbrook suggests, the shift began in 1999 we may have already had all the ‘cooling’ there is

A strange comment….looking at the shift in the PDO at 1945 (which was during high solar activity) we can see a gradual decline in temperatures that deepened towards the late 70′s.

Do you have any evidence that the decline in temperatures “deepened towards the late 1970s”? I’m sorry if the “cooling 1970s” fits with your theory but the fact remains that there was very little cooling after the mid-1950s. The 1970s were marginally – though not significantly – warmer than the 1960s. The 1955-80 trend is flat, i.e. neither warming nor cooling.

Hey Bill Illis (of ludicrous claim “The pro-AGW’ers hate it when real data is presented. It brings out an emotional reaction in them (see MVB above). They would prefer it if no actual data is presented and that we just continue on perpetuating the myth that today’s temperatures are the warmest ever.”), I suggest you actually read my comments. I’ve mode not one pro-AGW statement. I don’t even comment on AGW blogs, as they appear not interested in facts, precision, nuance, appropriate graphs, or ever admitting any mistake, no matter what is discovered or going on outside. So why throwing such nonsense at me?

As well as WUWT’s science postings. But the one I’m critiquing (above) just wouldn’t hold up to basic ‘peer-review’ (and I do not mean review by club members by that) and if the low standard continues, I simply won’t feel good about recommending WUWT to warmistas anymore.

Now, as I said above, Richard Alley in his (peer-reviewed) publication used an improper formula in converting the do18 isotope data to temperature. As BillD noted above, that was done so that everyone would properly scared by the scary Younger Dryas event (even though it was only one-half to one-quarter as big as Alley said it was and it was just one of about 30 such events in the Greenland ice cores – ie a normal periodic decline in temperatures on top of the 3 km high Greenland glacier).

I encourage anyone to use the actual GISP2 isotope data and make their own charts.

John Finn says:
The UAH trend since January 1998 is positive (~0.06 deg per decade) so he’s still wrong. It’s no longer cooling since 1998.

Wow, now who is “cherry picking”?

Err – you are. Every year since 2001 has been warmer than every other year in whatever record you choose – apart from the hugely anomalous 1998. Even using 1998 as the start peiod and using the correct method (Least Squares fit) to calculate the trend we get a positive slope. Don Easterbrook for some reason specified the 1999-2010 period in his post. You, somewhat charitably, decided to overlook this and decided to interpret his statement in the best light possible. However you inerpret it, the fact is there is no cooling. The last 10 years have been ~0.2 deg warmer than the previous 10 years. Even if you (incorrectly) decide to use ranking as your criteria, Roy Spencer has said there is not a statistically significant difference between 1998 and 2010. In other words they are, to all intents and purposes, equal.

In some cases it appears that agreement with the conclusion automatically means uncritical agreement with any argument leading to it. That shouldn’t be surprising. I dare say it’s a more prevalent thing in the climate disruption camp.

I took a look at the RB Alley paper that is the basis of important conclusions of this posting. The article is about rapid changes in climate in Greenland during the Dryas warming, that occured over 10,000 years ago. Evidently, Easterbrook some how plotted data from this study and spliced on what he considers comparable data for recent times.

########
made all the more mysterious when you actually look at greenland temperatures over the last 100 years.

If your “hmm” means that even NOAA shows that it was much warmer than it is now many times in the past 10,000 years, then “hmm” indeed!

#######

no my hmm had to do with the easterbrook chartmanship, and the fact that the record stops 100 years ago. and the cold temps.. -31C.. and looking at actual temps in greenland.. and wondering what alley has done and what easterbrook has done.

I wonder if all the climateheads could agree to an experiment. An idea about building three or more identical greenhouses, side by side, but far enough apart not to affect each other in any way. Humidity the same with thermometers calibrated and locations the same. One greenhouse has low ppm CO2, the next has high ppm CO2 and a third with smoke. More could be made for other gasses, such as methane. Wouldn’t the data solve the debate? Or is getting together not possible?

“When looking at temperature graphs covering thousands of years you must remember the changes in Earth obliquity and eccentricity and the resultant surface insolation differences. My understanding is that currently both obliquity and eccentricity are declining which will take us back into a long glacial period. In that light, shouldn’t we be encouraging anything we may be able to do that will help keep the the planet warmer?”

No kidding. We’re standing on the edge of a cliff looking at a sign that says “Holocene Interglacial Ends Here” and people are worried about backing away from the edge. Incredible.

Just to point out how close to the cliff we are the axial tilt change that begins and ends interglacial periods doesn’t change total solar insolation to the planet at all, per se. The only thing it does is increases the difference between average winter/summer temperatures as the tilt angle increases and decreases the difference when the angle is decreasing. Cooler summers with milder winters when angle is smaller and hotter summers plus colder winters when angle is larger. And we’re only talking a small change from 24 degrees tilt to 21 degrees and back again.

That small change in the seasons is enough for more snow to accumulate on northern hemisphere land masses when summers are cool and winters are mild. That ends up extending the range of year-round snow cover which in turn lowers the amount of sunlight absorbed by the surface helping the snow persist through the cooler summer season. This becomes a vicious cycle that doesn’t end until there’s a mile of ice covering every land mass north of Kentucky.

With the current arrangement of the continents this favors snow accumulation in the northern hemisphere

The Greenland ice sheet data points used in Figures 3, 4 and 5 both end in roughly 1900. (95 years before the year 2000) Therefore it doesn’t reflect any of the warming in the past 100 years. How does that data support the author’s statement that “most of the past 10,000 have been warmer than the present”?

There seem to be a lot of issues in these graphs that people are taking seriously. The CO2 increase versus decrease is possibly something that should be addressed, as should the dates in the proxies. but those are more or less labeling issues which do not detract from the message of the article. It might be fair to remember that in peer review, people are allowed to change their articles based on fair criticism.

And this is not really a peer-review article, its simply put, an article. I think there needs to be more labeling and corrections put into it.

The only real issue I see is the question of splicing should be cleared up. As someone who has seen first-hand how under-handed data splicing can be used to manipulate people, this is a dangerous thing to use in the first place. It needs to be labeled well so that we all know where its done.

I like this post!
I like Ed Murphy’s idea (he is the actor??!)
To summarise what I just said on another post:
Just to be clear on this:
If someone claims that global warming is caused by an increase in carbon dioxide it is up to that person to provide me with the evidence. In this respect I would need to see clear results in the relevant concentration range and it must show how much cooling and how much warming is caused by the CO2. This would have to include the radiative cooling caused by CO2 and the cooling by CO2 caused by taking part in the process of photo synthesis.
Just because someone or some entity makes a claim it is not up to me to”prove” that it is not so. A good lesson from the bible it is that you should never follow the crowd if you are not sure they are doing the right thing(s).
So if someone makes the claim (to me) that carbon dioxide is the cause of global warming, it is up to that person to provide me with that evidence. (Al Gore! Why does no one ask him?)
For that, I would expect to be shown me exact test results and the method and instruments used to get those results.
People I corresponded with like Weart and Alley, all claim that those results
do actually exist. Well, I could not find them.
IPPC and them used a system whereby the increase of CO2 and other GHG’s were measured from 1750 to 2005 and then a value of forcing was attributed to each of them according to the warming observed. This would make sense if we knew for sure that GHG’s are the cause of modern warming.
But, surely, that is looking at a problem from the wrong end? That is assuming you know what is causing warming and then working your way back. It is the worst mistake any scientist can make.
To be completely truthful, I did make a similar mistake myself in the past. It happens when you get carried away too much with what you think is right or what you think ought to be.
So, I think I know what went wrong and why the CO2 being branded as bad…
I now think the opposite of what I thought when I started my investigations….http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok

NOAA paper inadvertently confirms the findings of Dr. Don J. Easterbrook (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/28/2010%E2%80%94where-does-it-fit-in-the-warmest-year-list) by showing that 9,100 of the the past 10,500 years were warmer than any of the last 100 years!!! Of course the NOAA paper fails to mention that fact… It also shows MWP and the Little Ice Age… so just why are people freaking out over a little welcomed warmth when even warmer seems to be the planetary norm over the last 10,500 years?

It would be good for someone to do a detailed comparison with other Ice Core Data Sets from around the globe. Let’s see ALL the Ice Core Data in ONE graph (or set of graphs) please. Dr. Easterbrook, are you up for that? Thanks.

The NOAA paper abstract goes on about the error confidence and global climate synchronized with the Greenland Ice-Core data within 30 years. Interesting for it’s asserting that this data set has global relevance.

“ABSTRACT: Greenland ice-core records provide an exceptionally clear picture of many aspects of abrupt climate changes, and particularly of those associated with the Younger Dryas event, as reviewed here. Well-preserved annual layers can be counted confidently, with only 1% errors for the age of the end of the Younger Dryas 11,500 years before present. Ice-flow corrections allow reconstruction of snow accumulation rates over tens of thousands of years with little additional uncertainty. Glaciochemical and particulate data record atmospheric-loading changes with little uncertainty introduced by changes in snow accumulation. Confident paleothermometry is provided by site-specific calibrations using ice-isotopic ratios, borehole temperatures, and gas-isotopic ratios. Near-simultaneous changes in ice-core paleoclimatic indicators of local, regional, and more-widespread climate conditions demonstrate that much of the Earth experienced abrupt climate changes synchronous with Greenland within thirty years or less. Post-Younger Dryas changes have not duplicated the size, extent and rapidity of these paleoclimatic changes. ”ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/isotopes/gisp2_temp_accum_alley2000.txt

By the way, thank you Dr. Don J. Easterbrook for your excellent analysis. Keep up the great work. As mentioned earlier I’d love to see additional Ice Core Data Sets graphed and analyzed as you’ve done with the Greenland Ice Core Data Set.

“I wonder if all the climateheads could agree to an experiment. An idea about building three or more identical greenhouses, side by side, but far enough apart not to affect each other in any way.”

You wouldn’t be able to measure the difference. ‘Green Houses’ have almost nothing in common with ‘Greenhouse Gas Theory’. The roof of a greenhouse stops convection and the amount of heat trapped by the roof would far exceed any heat trapped by any additional CO2. Of course if you want to grow larger tomato’s then pumping CO2 into a greenhouse is a good idea. :)

Either you cannot meaningfully compare the instrumental record and the proxy record, in which case Easterbrook is wrong to say anything at all about temperatures in 2010 relative to reconstructions.

Or you *can* compare them, in which case Easterbrook is wrong to completely ignore the modern temperature record while claiming 2010 is cooler than the vast majority of the last 10k years. How you or anyone else thinks it is valid to not look at data past 1905 when making that claim is beyond me.

Either way, the article is misleading hogwash, irrespective of all the other issues raised in this thread, and your empty attempt at misdirection rather than an honest engagement with genuine criticism is duly noted.

richcar 1225 says:
December 29, 2010 at 10:31 am
I think everybody can agree that temps the last ten years globally have been flat. However, the cooling is just beginning. Check out UAH ch 4 (surface) which has just fallen off a cliff. It is now .8 degrees F below the same day last year.http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps

Yeow! We’re down to the level of 1998, and everyone knows how cold that was! The Ice Age is coming…

The operative question is not “has it been this warm before” the operative questions are.

1. What’s our best estimate of the temp over the next 100 years.
2. Can we do anything about it
3. should we, if we can.

1. What’s our best estimate of the temp over the next 100 years.

The best we have is none too good. There are at least a half a dozen hypotheses currently in play, which are at least arguable, regarding what is driving global climate and, by extension, global temperatures. Unless you’re an epistemological mattress back, none of them can be classified at a level higher than suggestive.

2. Can we do anything about it

Since we don’t really have a grip on what’s happening, probably not. But even if we stipulate to the AGW paradigm as “settled science” the almost complete failure of several decades of present attempts and the unimaginative nature of proposals for future action suggest that, even if the alarmists are mostly successful in implementing their plans, it will require a couple of order of magnitude improvement in our ability to measure global average temperature to detect any improvements that might occur.

3. should we, if we can.

Even rudimentary economic analysis of cost/benefit ratios and opportunity costs suggests that virtually everything currently being touted as potential solutions are horrendously bad usages of the planet’s finite wealth and resources. There are many actions humanity could be taking to protect and expand its well being and that of the planet as a whole. Trying to limit the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere in the vague hope that it will produce a state of global climate that might possibly be more benevolent is probably the least efficient and least likely to succeed use of our efforts and resources that could be imagined. Given that the people driving the climate agenda are the direct philosophical descendants of those who have been inflicting almost immeasurable misery, death, and repression on their fellow man for well over a century, in an effort to enforce their top down directed utopian delusions on the world, it is hardly surprising that this is the case.
Should we then do nothing? If the only alternative is to accept the proscriptions of the IPCC and its now vast bureaucratic machine, doing nothing would probably be the best choice. But human history has provided clear and almost incontrovertible evidence of a wiser path. Human well being has been on a real hockey stick like path of improvement over recent times. The two elements most responsible for that slope are cheap, reliable, and abundant energy and increasing individual freedom. Delivering as much of these two things to as many of the people of the world as possible should be our primary focus. Bringing most of the world to middle class levels of discretionary income would put short term stress on the Earth’s resources, but over the long term would alleviate environmental issues, which are mainly a middle class concern, population growth, which is driven by the portion of the human community living in the worst poverty, and increase our adaptability to whatever disasters do befall us in our uncertain future, because freer, wealthier societies have always shown themselves to almost infinitely more responsive and adaptable than poorer, more totalitarian, cultures.

“…this posting by Easterbrook completely lacks credibility and transparency. The main characteristic of a skeptical scientist is that he or she considers the data carefully, whether the conclusions agree or disagree with his or her world view.”

That last is surely projection. It is the alarmist crowd’s mind that is already made up. Skeptics still have questions. And there is voluminous evidence showing that the climate peer review process is thoroughly corrupt. See:

Prof Easterbrook has written an article of general interest. It is not intended as a peer reviewed, refereed article, in which every nit is picked. It has helped educate readers about natural climate cycles, myself included.

There is plenty of peer reviewed, physical evidence showing that the planet has naturally warmed and cooled to a much greater extent than currently; the null hypothesis remains un-falsified:

click1 [deueterium isotope records, from 740K ybp]click2 [Vostok, 420K ybp]click3 [another Vostok view]click4 [Vostok, 140K ybp. Warm is good. Cold is bad]click5 [it has been much warmer than now many times during the Holocene]click6 [We are currently in a warm interglacial]click7 [Younger Dryas, per Alley]click8 [the climate has rarely beeen as beneficial as it is now]click9 [Greenland, based on Alley’s data]click10 [Holocene, major warming/cooling periods]

Global harm as a result of rising CO2 has never been observed. The more we look at the past temperature record, the less influence CO2 has. The only definitive result of the recent rise in CO2 is beneficial: increased agricultural productivity.

The GISP2 graph shows only a 1.5 degree drop from the MWP to the Little ice age yet the temperature record for Upernavkik (1873-2010) shows a decrease of 6 degrees from a high in 1943 to a low in 1963. Clearly the ice cores is either not properly calibrated or is not high frequency enough to show rapid changes that have been observed in the instrument record.http://www.rimfrost.no/

Clearly current temperatures are about average for the last 10k years, even if they have warmed in the last 150 years. Debate over.

There is no need to say any more. This article itself beats around the bush for too long, sidetracked, distracted by by warmist whoppers.

The entire warmist argument is that temperatures are high and skyrocketing higher, relatively speaking. Relative to what? The history of the past 10k years, and 100k, and 1 million show that temperatures are well within historic trends. We must switch the whole debate to examining temperature history, and thus soothing alarm.

@ Ben D. (December 29, 2010 at 10:51 am)
I’d say that bad and incomplete labeling DOES detract from the message of the article. But “…the question of splicing should be cleared up. ”
Yes, absolutely. That appears to be the main obstacle here.

If I were to cut Easterbrook A LOT of slack, though, and pretend that wherever he was comparing ‘the past’ in a graph to ‘the present’ that he wasn’t actually referring to ‘the present’ in (Fig 2, 3, 4 or 5.) graph, but always to ‘the present’ in Fig 1 (the end values of Fig 1. do resemble those of the past decade, including 2010), then I think the following clarifications would greatly improve the article:

-clearly indicate what exactly is meant for “the present”, and in what year shown data end if it’s not the same; ideally have every graph end in the same present (even if you have to leave a period blank for lack of comparable data)
– wait a week for the year you’re discussing to be actually over, so at least the rough data is in.
– put BOTH isotope and derived corresponding temperature values on the Y-axis
– Presentation-wise (visually): use the same vertical graph-plotting, so spikes are visually comparable (to a lay person) without having to double-check the Y-axis for every graph
-have the horizontal line (for a present or base period to see positive and negative anomalies) at the same value in every graph; and either have all graphs anomaly graphs (with deviation from a base period), or all actual values, just for consistency.
– Clearly list location, data sources used, statistical smoothing used and a word about uncertainties for each graph. (a brief disclaimer paragraph for each graph, basically)
– And perhaps make it so that both X-axix and Y-axis on the graphs can be put next to each other both vertically as well as horizontally.
THEN we may still technically be looking at what amounts to little more than ‘anecdotal evidence’ (which I do think can hold validity when presented honestly), at least it wouldn’t be deceptive.

[You may be violating blog policy. The IP address comes from Utah, to an NGO, while the email address, “smeltendeijstijd@…” which looks like gobbledygook, points to the UK – please provide a valid email address. A valid email address is required to comment on this blog. -moderator]

I would ask the moderator that if you have a ranter, you insist on knowing that person’s name before publishing his or her comments. Tedious anonymous rants by those too cowardly to reveal their identity are obviously beneath contempt.

[You may be violating blog policy. The IP address comes from Utah, to an NGO, while the email address, “smeltendeijstijd@…” which looks like gobbledygook, points to the UK – please provide a valid email address. A valid email address is required to comment on this blog. -moderator]

To be fair all the potential trolls in the vicinity you do know, or so I presume you at least ought to, that people don’t always reside or work in the country they have their email addy servers located right? And there’s always the possibility of proxies, and even NGO’s use ’em

And what you might be calling gobbledygook other people call Dutch, the only proper hippie language if there ever was one. :p

Moderator, I’m in a ski town in UT and used/am using the NGOs computer, using my long-time UK address; what policy could I be breaking? If your intention is keep me from commenting, because I express some critiques (that many other commenters share, actually), you’re well on your way to ruin the high regard I’ve had for WUWT.

And the email address is only gobbledygook if you speak only English, I suppose.
——————–

And please quit the baseless picking, Peter Miller. It’s not helpful. For one, I mostly agree with Dave Wendt’s answers to Steven Mosher’s questions. My comments are in direct response to the article this is a tread on, however, and my previous comment are merely some suggestions of how the article’s quality could be raised. I’m not “ranting”, I’m commenting to the point. You should give it a try, “Peter Miller”.

To address the complaints of many critics of this presentation, yes it would be fairer if e.g. the graph of ice core temperature proxy results was brought up to 2010 and presumably be shown to currently be at a little lower than the peak of the medieval warm period.

The point would remain thorough made however, that there’s much thoroughly misleading noise about unprecedented recent temperatures.

Yeah the rise in temps since 1977 has been rapid, but so was it in the early parts of the medieval warm period.

Generally the standards on WUWT are very high but quite a few very poor comments here from “pseudo” scientists.

For those who have strong views on this, it is not acceptable just to simply use vulgar language to support whatever hypothesis you have.

This is NOT science.

I haven’t seen one qualified statement that refutes anything Don Easterbrook has written. Some of it is simply derived from the rather “unscientific” critique from the rather theological Skeptical Science Blog.

Just one major point, that always comes up about Don Easterbrook’s thesis on global cooling. The HADCRUT does show cooling from 1999 onwards, and even Professor Phil Jones admits it. 2010 hasn’t finished yet! (though I wouldn’t expect a pseudo scientist to wait for their experiment to finish before drawing a conclusion). The dispute on this is whether it is statistically significant. If the cooling continues, which it is (just check the current satellite surface temperatures), the cooling would have started around about 1998.

“December 2010 has been one of the coldest Decembers in a century in many parts of the world, so 2010 probably won’t be warmer than 1998. “

In calculating the Global MetAnn Temperature (Giss/NCDC etc), December 2010 will contribute to 2011 as calculations run Dec to Nov. As far as they are concerned Dec 2009-Nov 2010 means the 2010 MetAnn year has finished.

Perhaps you-or someone else here- knows whether this statement is true-I have seen it repeated several times over the last few months.

“As for this being the warmest decade ever – yes, since it is measured by means of an algorithm that is different to that used in any previous decade and therefore incomparable to anything else. That said, an anonymous troll in the UK Met Office (Think CRU with a supercomputer they have to justify!) announced that they only use the highest recorded temperatures and select the highest 15 of these in any three month period to calculate the “average” for the period. If that is true, then their figures are right – except they are ignoring the lowest temperatures recorded which would lower this figure considerably.”

Amazing. So you don’t see anything valid in the numerous responses that point out that Easterbrook cannot support this statement:

> Of the past 10,500 years, 9,100 were warmer than 1934/1998/2010.

by using a graph that *does not show* the temperature in 2010?

Go back to his figure 5.

Mentally draw a horizontal line across the graph at -29C which is approximately the current annual average temperature for Greenland.

Do the three peaks above that line *really* constitute 9100 years out of 10,500? Or is Easterbrook pretending that the temperature where the graph stops (1905) is the current temperature today?

How can you look at a graph like that and defend it? Seriously, how? Once again, this is utterly shameless.

I have a growing respect for the people who have put a huge amount of time and effort into investigating these things for themselves, with a far deeper knowledge than I will ever possess, and while I may strongly disagree with some of their methods, conclusions or opinions (particularly on politics and jockeying away from the science itself), healthy skepticism, constructive effort and honest, diligent analysis of data is always to be applauded, loudly. OTOH, giving blatantly dishonest stuff like this a free pass is not.

I would propose to attach a disclaimer to all scientific essays, whenever the GISS temperature reconstruction is used or displayed:

WARNING:

GISS temperature is under strong suspicion of a warming bias because of:

1. Multiple undocumented temperature adjustments, warming recent and cooling former temperature history.
2. Extrapolation of faster warming land based temperatures into ocean areas with no data available.
3. A disfunctional UHI correction at least for the world excluding the USA.
4. A much higher warming trend than the tropospheric trend measured with satellites, despite all climate models expecting the troposphere to warm faster instead.
5 Conviction of GISS author J. Hansen of unlawful acts related to climate change activism.

Very funny how Dr. Don J. Easterbrook is “hiding the incline” of Greenland temperatures.

Here is stated:

“Another graph of temperatures from the Greenland ice core for the past 10,000 years is shown in Figure 5. It shows essentially the same temperatures as Cuffy and Clow (1997) but with somewhat greater detail. What both of these temperature curves show is that virtually all of the past 10,000 years has been warmer than the present.”

In this post the graph:

“Figure 5. Temperatures over the past 10,000 years recorded in the GISP2 Greenland ice core – ”

Is based on the GISP2 Ice Core Temperature data. You can download it here:

Yet Dr. Don J. Easterbrook does not warn us that the graph, instead it is stated:

“What both of these temperature curves show is that virtually all of the past 10,000 years has been warmer than the present.”

That is true only if you call “present” the year 1905!

After this, it is claimed:

“Of the past 10,500 years, 9,100 were warmer than 1934/1998/2010. Thus, regardless of which year ( 1934, 1998, or 2010) turns out to be the warmest of the past century, that year will rank number 9,099 in the long-term list.

The climate has been warming slowly since the Little Ice Age (Fig. 5), but it has quite a ways to go yet before reaching the temperature levels that persisted for nearly all of the past 10,500 years.”

Really?

Well, we can access the GISTEMP dataset to show how much has Greenland warmed since 1905:

GISTEMP map of temperature anomaly (250 km grid) of the decade 2000-2010 relative to the period 1900-1910:

“So where do the 1934/1998/2010 warm years rank in the long-term list of warm years? ”

Well, leaving behind 1938 that was record warm ONLY in the United States, 1998 and 2010 are, in Greenland, in the range of the peaks of the warmest periods in the last 10 000 years! (if you take +3ºC value the last decade was the warmest in the Greenland Holocene, but given the range of uncertainty, is more correct that is tied with the Minoan Warming and the Holocene Maximum).

If you check the data, you find the degree at with the central conclusion of this post is wrong. This has been exposed here:

The year 2010 so far is the warmest on record on GISTEMP and NCDC datasets and tied for warmest with 1998 in the UAH dataset, all this despite that the 2009-2010 was not a Super El Niño like the 1997-1998 one.

The 2000-2009 decade was the warmest on record, so talking about “global cooling” now is ridiculous, in the warmest year of the warmest decade on record!

Result a whole decade (the most recent) warmer (in Greenland) than the “record warm” year of 1998!

For those that note that in the maps given 1998 is warmer than 2010, this ius because of the missing data in the Arctic. If you suppose that here the temperature is like the global anomaly, then youy get that result. If you suppose that temperatures there are similar to the nearest meteorological station (a much more reasonable assumption, that is fullfilled with a 1000 km smooting radius) you get:

GISS temperature is under strong suspicion of a warming bias because of:

1. Multiple undocumented temperature adjustments, warming recent and cooling former temperature history.
2. Extrapolation of faster warming land based temperatures into ocean areas with no data available.
3. A disfunctional UHI correction at least for the world excluding the USA.
4. A much higher warming trend than the tropospheric trend measured with satellites, despite all climate models expecting the troposphere to warm faster instead.
5. Conviction of GISS author J. Hansen for unlawful acts related to climate change activism.)

Thanks for the links, ‘From Peru’! And points well made, as well.
In my 5:21 am comment (MVB says: December 29, 2010 at 5:21 am) I mentioned something about the temperature anomaly for the GISP2 location having a value close to or slightly cooler than to the 1951-1980 mean. And concluded that “In other words: even if the Fig. 5 graph extended all the way to today, it’s clear that 2010 could not beat warm periods such as Roman or Minoan Warm Periods (let alone the likely peak years within those periods).” We seem to agree on some key problems with the article, but you point out that the past decade could actually be in the ballpark of the Roman or even Minoan Warm Periods. For that particular aspect, I must admit: you’re right, and I was wrong. I had mistakenly looked at Nov 2009 anomaly map (which was relatively cold in central Greenland then), and not the 2010 annual value, which does indeed raise the possibility your state. And that does make Easterbrook’s narrative around Figure 5. even worse than I thought (again).

If I keep digressing, perhaps some not-very-scientifically-inclined folks will become nicer to me. …Nothing will hold, … Nothing will fit, … Into the cold,… No smile on your lips, Living in the Ice age…

I think what needed to be said (that Easterbrook missed the mark on this port and precicely why) has been said in different words several times today.

Even the disreputable Phil Jones [you know he will never get his former reputation back] admits that the current rise in temperature is completely natural: click

So another climate scare is debunked: that the current temperature rise is alarming, when Jones shows that it is routine and ordinary. Scientific skeptics are still batting a thousand, while the alarmist crowd can’t point to one single verifiable bit of harm done to the planet due to the ≈40% rise in beneficial CO2.

That’s a big increase, isn’t it? If CO2 caused catastrophic harm, you would think we’d be seeing a little of it by now. But not one warmist claim about damage from CO2 stands up to scientific scrutiny. Every scare has been debunked in turn.

Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance explains the close similarities between Mrs Keech’s flying saucer cult, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and CO2=CAGW true believers: in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence, they believe even more strongly in their fantasy. Each one of them is a doomsday cult.

Orwell called it “doublethink”: holding two contradictory ideas at the same time. It’s a form of mental illness, and no doubt when the glaciers are once again descending over the Great Lakes and northern Europe, there will still be true believers in the cult of AGW among our descendants, waiting for harmless and beneficial CO2 to cause runaway global warming.

Fortunately, scientific skeptics are relatively immune from cognitive dissonance. The reason is that skeptics simply ask questions about a hypothesis. They have no hypothesis of their own, except for the null hypothesis – that the climate is currently well within its historical parameters, and that everything occurring now has happened repeatedly before. The climate null hypothesis has never been falsified.

Festinger said that if you provide evidence that someone is wrong, they will question your sources. A while back Joel Shore questioned the source of a graph I had linked to, which contradicted his position. In response I posted fifty (50) similar graphs, all showiing the same thing, from many different peer reviewed sources. Joel’s response? He went through every single graph, and claimed to find something wrong with each one. He could not show that he was right, so he questioned the sources that showed he was wrong.

Scientific skeptics are dealing with cognitive dissonance-afflicted CAGW doom cultists. Their minds are closed to reason. That is why they constantly morph their arguments whenever one of their pet examples of CAGW is debunked. They operate based on faith, not on reason. That’s why it’s turned into a Whack-A-Mole effort by skeptics. As each CAGW belief/mole is whacked, another one pops out. Against all rational evidence, they are still convinced that CO2 emissions will lead to planetary catastrophe.

A man with conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts and figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point… presented with evidence – unequivocal and undeniable evidence – that his belief is wrong, he will emerge not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even evince new fervor about convincing and converting others to his view.
– Leon Festinger, “When Prophecy Fails”

You dispute that the climate has been warming since the LIA. What planet are you reporting from? The planet of Skeptical Cognitive Dissonance ‘Science’? The blog run by the cartoonist?

In fact, the climate has been warming since the LIA, although it has quite a way to go before reaching the the numerous highs of the Holocene. For necessary enlightenment, see my post @1:04 above.

Here is an example [current temperature at left side of chart]. Here’s another. We’re pretty much in the sweet spot right now.

Until/unless you can falsify the climate null hypothesis with your alternate CO2=CAGW conjecture, then the long held theory of natural climate variability remains standing, and what we’re currently observing is no different than what has happened naturally countless times before.

Models are not evidence, They are programs. Testable, replicable, empirical [real world, raw data] evidence are required by the scientific method.

But instead of using the rigorous scientific method, the alarmist crowd falls back on its phony claims of consensus. Which is why WUWT leaves your sparsely trafficked echo chamber blogs in the dust. The scientific method rules here.

Try using real science for a change. If you do, your conclusions regarding CAGW will inevitably change 180°.

Manfred said December 29, 2010 at 6:24 pm:
“wrong:”
————–
Do you know what “after 1998″ means, Manfred? Plot 1999-2010, or for that matter you could plot 1997-2010 and get upward trends in all three sets … Jones clearly said that even a 15 year timeline was sometimes too short to establish a meaningful trend.

… yet another prime example of non-robust cherry-picking. When is that weak tactic going to stop around here?

Where is peer review when you need it? This post conflates the global climate record with regional records for the US and Greenland. Then it fails to point out that “present” only goes up to 1905. Over the last 21 years, I have been the editor or reviewer for over 600 manuscripts submited for publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals (I need to keep a record for my employer).

You try to compare 1998 and 2010 by skipping 1998 completely, and start in 1999 right in the middle of the deepest La Nina dominated temperatures of the decade. On the other side, however, you prefer ending in 2010, mostly dominated by another El Nino.

That’s a bit unsporty.

I left out 2010. Sorry for that. In a few months this tiny increase will be gone as well, though not in dubious GISS data, I suppose.

“You dispute that the climate has been warming since the LIA.In fact, the climate has been warming since the LIA, although it has quite a way to go before reaching the the numerous highs of the Holocene. ”

I do not dispute that there was warming from the LIA. What I have shown is that in just a century Greenland has warmed a whole 2-4ºC , equating the levels seen in the Holocene Maximum.

“Here is an example. Here’s another. We’re pretty much in the sweet spot right now.”

Well, in your example of Greenland you have chopped off an entire century of warming. You have committed the same mistake that the author of this WUWT post. The GISP2 Ice Core Temperature data ends in 1905, so you MUST obtain the last 100 years from the instrumental temperature record (weather stations). And they show a warming between 2ºC and 4ºC, and this is equal to the peak warming of the Holocene Maximum.

Now the question:

How do you explain that in just a century Greenland warmed to levels seen in the Holocene Maximum (when Milanktovich cycles, that is orbital, precessional and Earth inclination were giving a bigger insolation than today) despite the cooling trend in Milanktovich cycles ?

Starting at 1998 at the peak of an El Nino and ending with the first 1/2 of 2010 doesn’t give an accurate picture as to whether there has been a warming, flat, or cooling trend since 1998. The La Nina that followed the 1998 El Nino ran its course. But the La Nina that is following the 2009/10 El Nino hasn’t run its course yet. So to pick an ending point before it does is imbalanced since the trough of the 1999 La Nina is in it but the completed trough of the 2010/11 La Nina is not. It is easy to predict that when the current La Nina finishes there will be a cooling tend in the data since 1998.

You try to compare 1998 and 2010 by skipping 1998 completely, and start in 1999 right in the middle of the deepest La Nina dominated temperatures of the decade. On the other side, however, you prefer ending in 2010, mostly dominated by another El Nino.

That’s a bit unsporty.”

I did not mentioned at all 1999. I started from 1979, the year that began the satellite record. I ended in 2010 because that is the present year.

“I left out 2010. Sorry for that. In a few months this tiny increase will be gone as well, though not in dubious GISS data, I suppose.”

This not so tiny increase will be offset by La Niña cooling, but the trend will not, as it hasn’t all those years since 1998.

“Jones clearly said that even a 15 year timeline was sometimes too short to establish a meaningful trend… yet another prime example of non-robust cherry-picking. When is that weak tactic going to stop around here?”

It is you and your alarmist cronies who constantly cherry-pick. So let’s look at the entire Holocene, shall we? click

Nothing unusual is happening with the climate. Nothing. But continue your cognitive dissonance-induceced scare, for what it’s worth.

“How do you explain that in just a century Greenland warmed to levels seen in the Holocene Maximum?”

You just don’t understand. It is only natural climate variability, which has occurred numerous times throughout the pre-SUV past. Greenland is far from the warmer temperatures of the past. And CO2 has very little to do with any of it.

Harrywr2, I thought CO2 was also about reflecting solar energy back to the surface and radiating absorbed heat at nighttime so the convection shouldn’t be a real issue. The only reason you wouldn’t be able to measure a difference in greenhouses is because CO2 has no effects.

What I am urging is that people practice some consistency in the skeptical arguments.
For my own part I try to maintain a consistent approach.

1, if you don’t show your data and tour methods (code) I am not obligated to take your results seriously. skeptic or non skeptic.

2. If you argue on one thread that we cannot estimate a global temperature from 7000 stations then I fully expect you to question ANY reconstruction based on proxies from limited areas.

3. if you argue about the accuracy of thermometers I expect to see you demanding error bars on all reconstructions.

now to your points

“But as GISS shows, greenland being warm means that a good portion of the world map becomes red suddenly. I am not one to say that Greenland is either good or bad as a place to measure global temperature, but if you put any stock of faith in GISS (which I admit you do not….then this might be a starting point of some sort.)”

actually if polar amplification is accurate greenland would warm more rapidly than the rest of the world. So it would not be a good place to start unless you could accurately assess the amount of amplification. 2nd. In some recent work with greenland ice cores its been shown that they do correlate differently with different grid cells.

“Greenland’s temperature versus the rest of the world might be a better comparison with our known temperature records. I think that might be the better question here regarding assumption of Greenland being the entire world.”

I guess my point is this. We complain when Mann shows a chart of the NH reconstruction of say summer month temps. We say ” what about the other months, what about the SH, etc etc. I expect the same kind of responses when I see a chart of greenland ice cores. Measured, systematic, consistent, principled skepticism. NOT selective skepticism.

“1. What’s our best estimate of the temp over the next 100 years.
Barring any major changes in solar output etcetc, probably a warming of .7 – 1 degrees like the previous century. I put in .3 as possible for CO2 increases. Biosphere might just take care of a lot of it, I think its something to think about anyway. Regardless, this is something we could argue about, and it would be rather fruit-less as this is nothing more then “an educated guess” with some being more educated then others.”

there is nothing wrong with educated guesses. the key point would be documenting your assumptions and presenting the case.

On your other points, I’d agree that nuclear seems to be a win win. But most AGwers are so tied to a prefferred solution that they seem incapble of seizing the moment to make a big nuk push. odd.

From Peru says:
December 29, 2010 at 5:26 pmVery funny how Dr. Don J. Easterbrook is “hiding the incline” of Greenland temperatures.
………..Is based on the GISP2 Ice Core Temperature data. You can download it here:

I see on the graph in figure 5 that the bottom axis ends in 1905 (95) so what exactly is your point?

I get the impression you went on the “Skeptical Science” blog and copied verbatim the criticism without actually reading Don Easterbrook’s post, the point of which is to demonstrate large temperature swings through the last few thousand years, i.e. the current temperature rise is quite normal.

What many don’t realise is that the debate is not about whether we have had warming. No-one disputes it. The debate is whether the warming is unnatural. This post answers that argument, by examining temperature changes over the past few thousand years.

Do you have any evidence that the decline in temperatures “deepened towards the late 1970s”? I’m sorry if the “cooling 1970s” fits with your theory but the fact remains that there was very little cooling after the mid-1950s. The 1970s were marginally – though not significantly – warmer than the 1960s. The 1955-80 trend is flat, i.e. neither warming nor cooling.

The one off records of deep lows and snow levels, cold winters etc occurred in the 70’s, the yearly global GISS record shows the 70’s as flat across the PDO negative phase of 1945-1975. But the big events happen in the winter when the low solar output, neg PDO and neg AMO were present, this was the time when science was suspecting another ice age. We are in a similar point now, the AMO is edging negative already and the solar output will be lower than SC20. Dont forget that the era I am referring to had the highest solar cycle on record which explains the small world wide recovery at 1955. Solar is important but the oceans rule.

Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
December 29, 2010 at 8:17 pm
From Peru.

A correction to what you did with your ending point:

Starting at 1998 at the peak of an El Nino and ending with the first 1/2 of 2010 doesn’t give an accurate picture as to whether there has been a warming, flat, or cooling trend since 1998. The La Nina that followed the 1998 El Nino ran its course. But the La Nina that is following the 2009/10 El Nino hasn’t run its course yet. So to pick an ending point before it does is imbalanced since the trough of the 1999 La Nina is in it but the completed trough of the 2010/11 La Nina is not. It is easy to predict that when the current La Nina finishes there will be a cooling tend in the data since 1998.

I see – so you want to use a short term trend which begins with an El Nino and ends with a La Nina. This tactic should enable you to build up a series of cooling trends throughout the last century. The fairest way is to go peak to peak or trough to trough (not peak to trough) so use 1998-2010 or 1999-2011 (or 2009) – take your pick. It doesn’t matter which both show a positive trend.

I see – so you want to use a short term trend which begins with an El Nino and ends with a La Nina. This tactic

Whatever. You can manipulate data any way you’d like to come up with the results you’d wish for. My point was not about peak to peak and trough to trough. That is what you characterized it as. If you wish to say the world is warming then good luck to you.

Ed Murphy,
You say that a smoke filled greenhouse is warmer than one with clear air.
Has anyone done the experiment to find out if a greenhouse with 2,000ppm CO2 is warmer than one with 400ppm, everything else being equal?
Or is that not relevant?

The concentration doesn’t matter for how much LWIR absorption occurs. The only thing that matters is the total number of molecules. In a greenhouse with a gas column depth of perhaps 12 feet (floor to ceiling) a concentration of 2000ppm is only equivalent to a 60 foot column of normal atmosphere.

In order to simulate the CO2 LWIR absorption of just the lower 6000 feet of atmosphere inside a greenhouse would require a concentration of 200,000ppm (20%) which is toxic to animals and maybe (I’d have to look it up but I know that beneficial effect for plants stops at about 2000ppm) for plants too. Even then the greenhouse would only be warmer by about a single degree C. I don’t think you’d be able to measure the effect at 2000ppm because you couldn’t adequately control the experiment to compare 400ppm vs 2000ppm down to a hundredth of a degree difference in temperature. Any tiny difference aside from CO2 between the two setups could cause a 0.01 degree divergence.

John Tyndall discovered this 150 years ago along with the logarithmic curve in total absorption with increasing number of molecules of absorptive gases. Tyndal performed literally thousands of experiments on a score of different gases and with each gas he varied just about everything he could from the length of the column containing the gas to the partial pressure of the gas to the temperature of his thermal IR heat source. Tyndall “wrote the book” on this subject and his results, although refined in precision and accuracy since then, have withstood the test of time.

Henry@from Peru
I think you might be confused here on this site.
Here we want more warming, we like it, we take our holidays where it is warm.
and we want more carbon dioxide
because it is better for forest growth
You are welcome to check my blog as to why I think that modern warming is natural and has nothing to do with the carbon dioxidehttp://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
OK?

Dr. Easterbrook would never be able to publish this analysis in a peer-reviewed journal on climate change. There are several reasons for that.

He presents the GISP2 data as if it is new, and surprising, and sufficient in itself to discredit countervailing work on climate change.

He never mentions that this is 17-year-old data that has been reviewed and analyzed in tens of publications on climate change over the past 15 years, including the IPCC reports.

He doesn’t mentions the many publications that show that this northern-hermisphere, GISP2 data is contradicted by southern-hemisphere ice core data, revealing a millennial seesaw of warming and cooling between the poles (e.g. Steig, Alley, 2002).

He doesn’t mention the publications that show GISP2 data in the context of global processes and other types of climate data from around the world (e.g. Barker, 2009 or Sigman, 2010).

Instead, Easterbrook publishes this intellectually dishonest analysis, which would not pass peer review, in this public forum, where readers don’t have the background to recognize its flaws?

“I see on the graph in figure 5 that the bottom axis ends in 1905 (95) so what exactly is your point?”

My point is that Dr. Don J. Easterbrook used the data as if the end of the timeseries is the present (it is no clue in text about it, that text argument as if the graph end in the present. The only clue is in the small labels in the x-scales that easily are lost. This is the “small letters trick”, a common commercial trick used to deceive the consumer).

It isn’t, and if you include the last 100 years of warming you found that we are now at the levels of the Holocene Maximum warming, erasing millenia of natural cooling.

“I get the impression you went on the “Skeptical Science” blog and copied verbatim the criticism without actually reading Don Easterbrook’s post”

Nope. Skepticalscience was absolutely not used as my source, only the GISP2 ice core data , and the meteorological temperature record in Greenland

“the point of which is to demonstrate large temperature swings through the last few thousand years, i.e. the current temperature rise is quite normal”

Do you consider “normal” a 2-4ºC warming in just 100 years?

“What many don’t realise is that the debate is not about whether we have had warming. No-one disputes it”

Really? What about all the nonsense about the “post-1998 global cooling”?

“The debate is whether the warming is unnatural. This post answers that argument, by examining temperature changes over the past few thousand years.”

This post don’t answer that argument, only shows temperature variations, not the causes of warming and cooling. What is clear, once you include the last 100 years of warming (from meteorological data) is that in a century we are back, in Greenland, to the warmth of the Minoan Warming and the Holocene Maximum. That is, modern warming erased millenia of cooling.

Now, what caused this warming?

Whatever it is, it must act against the cooling caused by Milanktovich Cycles (orbital, earth inclination and precessional cycles) that are causing since 10 000 years ago a gradual cooling in the Arctic.

You can visualize Milanktovich Cycles here, along with CO2, CH4 and temperature from ice cores in the Interactive Vostok Viewer:

I continue to find it interesting at how a simple presentation of the data is so unsettling/disturbing for the pro-AGW’ers.

To continue on with that reaction, here is some more data for you.

Antarctica versus Greenland ice core proxy temperatures over the last 22,000 years – the transition out of the last ice age until today. [Please note the Older Dryas Event at 14,300 years ago so that one can get some perspective on the Younger Dryas Event which was smaller and less significant than its Older version].

And then Antarctica and Greenland over the last ice age – 120,000 years. [Please note how Greenland has much more variability – the 25 Dansgaard-Oeschger events of which the 3 Dryas Events are just examples of].

And then the North Atlantic proxy temperatures versus Antarctica and CO2 and global solar irradiance over the last 800,000 years. [Please note how small the CO2 influence is especially considering it lags behind the temperature changes by 800 to 2000 years thoughout the entire record].

“…in a century we are back, in Greenland, to the warmth of the Minoan Warming and the Holocene Maximum. That is, modern warming erased millenia of cooling.”

That is just not true. Currently we are 2 – 3° below the Minoan Optimum. The temperature has risen by a mild 0.7°C over the past century; something that has occurred repeatedly and often throughout the Holocene.

Natural climate variability completely explains the rise, with no need for an extraneous variable such as CO2 — which follows rises in temperature. Effect cannot precede cause, and the climate null hypothesis has never been falsified. What we are observing is natural and routine.

It is coincidental that there has been a 0.7° rise which overlaps the ≈40% rise in CO2 [that is a substantial rise, but there is no evidence that any global harm has occurred as a result. The only observable result is increased agricultural productivity]. The rise in CO2 probably caused a fraction of that warming. But there is no testable evidence showing that the effect is more than minuscule. And the GCMs that are the basis for the bedwetters’ fright can’t predict their way out of a wet paper bag.

So, who to believe? Drs Alley and Easterbrook, who have forgotten more about climate history than someone from Peru will ever learn? Or should we believe From Peru, who makes up his facts as he goes along, and wouldn’t know the scientific method if it bit him on the ankle?

Inventing flat-out wrong statements are fine at realclimate [just so long as they support the belief system that says CO2 will cause climate catastrophe]. But making up facts doesn’t pass muster here at the internet’s “Best Science” site.

Cognitive dissonance does strange things to members of the CAGW Doomsday Cult.

From his analysis GISP2 the temperature in Central Greenland approximates to that of the Minoan Warm Period, although I did find an older paper with the GRIP and DYE 3 ice cores where the current temperature is closer to the Medieval Warm Period.

“Do you consider “normal” a 2-4ºC warming in just 100 years?”

Do you? According to the GISP2 data we had warming from -46C to -36C in the 200 years from 9750 to 9550 BC. That makes the 2.5C warming of the Greenland coastal regions in the 50 years from 1880 to 1930 look pretty normal.

Smokey, you and others quote Richard Alley approvingly, implying that he agrees with Don Easterbrook. He does not.

This is what Richard Alley said earlier this week in a correction to a story in the NY Times:

“I continue to believe that the assessments of the IPCC, and the National Academy of Sciences, provide our best guide to the effects of carbon dioxide on climate. My statements were intended to communicate the assessed science.

The interested reader might start with Figure 1 in Box 10.2 in chapter 10 of the I.P.C.C. Working Group 1 Fourth Assessment Report. The best estimate of climate sensitivity is near 3 degrees Centigrade of warming, or 5 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit, for equilibrium response to doubled CO2, but with an uncertainty range that extends further to higher values than to lower ones. As shown there, if one wants to be highly confident that the stated uncertainty range includes all possibilities, sensitivity as high as 8 or 9 degrees Centigrade, or 14 to 16 degrees Fahrenheit, is at least slightly possible based on some analyses. Proper quantification is given there and in the references cited by the I.P.C.C. report.”

As you ask: “So, who to believe?” You’ve got to choose between Alley and Easterbook.

Oregon Perspective: Let’s do some basic math for Richard Alley (since he has a few problems in this area).

If 9.0C per doubling was correct, what should the temperature have increased so far?

Temp C Increase = +4.3C = 9/ln(2)*ln(390/280)

So Alley is only off by a factor of 6 so far.

He gave the Bjerknes lecture last year at the fall AGU meeting on the CO2 sensitivity based on the paleoclimate data. One can only see less than 3.0C per doubling (more like 1.5C per doubling) in that data so why would he now try to quote a figure which is more than three times higher. It is disingenuous at best.

Sorry I didn’t make my response clearer. I was referring to both the article, and to the chart from the Journal of Quaternary Science Reviews, which is based on Alley’s data. I agree that Alley flip-flops, which wrecks his credibility.

But I was responding to Peru, who flatly stated that “in a century we are back, in Greenland, to the warmth of the Minoan Warming and the Holocene Maximum.” The chart based on Alley’s data shows that isn’t true. And in the article Dr Easterbrook also shows that it isn’t true.

The way I read his post, I don’t think Bill Illis is using a 9° sensitivity. Bill said 1.5°C. He knows more than I do about this particular subject, so I’ll defer to him. But if I were to make a SWAG, I would say <1°C.

That chart is not “from the Journal of Quaternary Science Reviews”, as you claim. The chart was supposedly put together from Alley’s data by David Lappi, a petroleum geologist from Alaska without any experience in ice cores or climate science. The chart has never been peer-reviewed for publication, so don’t imply it has.

Even if we accept it without review, the chart does not include the last 105 years of temperature change in Greenland, which is likely greater than the global temperature change of 0.79 degrees C over that period.

As noted elsewhere, Easterbrook’s data has the same flaws. It is missing the last 100 years of temperature change and has never been peer-reviewed.

From Peru says:
December 30, 2010 at 2:27 pm
Bob from the UK says:
December 30, 2010 at 1:39 am

“I see on the graph in figure 5 that the bottom axis ends in 1905 (95) so what exactly is your point?”

My point is that Dr. Don J. Easterbrook used the data as if the end of the timeseries is the present (it is no clue in text about it, that text argument as if the graph end in the present. The only clue is in the small labels in the x-scales that easily are lost. This is the “small letters trick”, a common commercial trick used to deceive the consumer).

It’s actually worse than that because the legend of the graph has had ‘2000AD’ added to indicate ‘present’ which is incorrect, in this context ‘years before present’ means years before 1950’! Consequently the last data shown is for 1855AD.

A larger problem for Bill, Smokey, and Easterbrook is that you all are just cherry picking charts and data that support your case. That’s not science, that’s propaganda.

As I noted above, 15 years of peer-review of Alley’s GISP2 data shows that GISP2 temperatures are not very representative of global temperature, as noted in tens of publications over the last 15 years, including a 2002 review by Alley.

You and Easterboork also choose to ignore the other publications that put the GISP2 data in a global context or other data and confounding climate processes. See Barker in Nature 2009, and or Sigman in Nature, 2010 as examples. Pdfs of these are available online.

You are the one who quoted Richard Alley’s assertion that the CO2 sensitivity could be as high as 9.0C per doubling. In fact, you are just quoting the quote he gave in the New York Times no less (“the New York Times” no less to say it again). He even started with a 20 degree number before correcting it twice.

I’m sorry, but your hero has a problem with basic math (either that or he has a serious problem with exaggeration including in his peer-reviewed papers).

I read the provenance of the chart, which is right in the chart itself; center near the bottom. It also states that the data is from Alley.

And I didn’t “imply” that the chart is peer reviewed – not that climate peer review is anything but “pal review”: Michael Mann’s recent paper based on the Tiljander proxy was hand-waved through peer review, even though it is documented that Mann knew before he submitted his paper that the Tiljander proxy changed the sign; it was corrupted from road grading. But Mann used it anyway, knowing his referee pals could be counted on to chalk up another bogus climate paper. Climate pal review is important to you. To me, not so much.

Dr Easterbrook’s chart also confirms that the Holocene had numeous temperature rises just like the one we’re going through. Occam’s Razor says that the current rise is simply natural variability.

And the question of the last century has been addressed to my satisfaction, and that of most other commentators. So why is it so important to you that the current *mild* 0.7° rise must equal the Minoan? That proves nothing, even if it were true. Your contention isn’t supported by the data I’ve seen and posted, but you seem rather desperate to alarm the populace.

Relax, CO2 isn’t gonna getcha. If you have to worry, then worry about asteroids. Unlike CAGW, that is a real threat.

I realize that James Hansen is both incompetent and criminally liable for faking data and fueling the false fires of AGW, but why is NASA in general becoming more and more involved in climate and temperature discussions? Is it because they have nothing to do these days and they need a purpose of crisis to justify their existence and umm budget? Every few months or so, they come out with some assinine statement about pretty much nothing just to make people remember they are there. So has the head of NASA decided to give Hansen more visibility or something to garner a greater role in “fighting AGW”? Just trying to analyze what they have been up to lately.

“Currently we are 2 – 3° below the Minoan Optimum. The temperature has risen by a mild 0.7°C over the past century; something that has occurred repeatedly and often throughout the Holocene”

Mr Smokey, that “mild 0.7ºC” is the GLOBAL average.

The GISP2 data if from an ice core in GREENLAND, so you must compare the ancient temperatures in Greenland to modern temperatures THERE . In Greenland the warming between the 1900-1910 decade and the 2000-2010 decade is between 2ºC and 4ºC. And the Holocene Maximum and the Minoan Warm Period were 3ºC warmer than in 1905. So we are back to the temperatures seen in those ancient warm periods.

“But I was responding to Peru, who flatly stated that “in a century we are back, in Greenland, to the warmth of the Minoan Warming and the Holocene Maximum.” The chart based on Alley’s data shows that isn’t true. And in the article Dr Easterbrook also shows that it isn’t true”

What is not true is your the conclusions you draw from a mutilated graph that ends in 1905, ignoring 105 years of warming, that clearly show a warming between 2ºC and 4ºC. You are clearly wrong, and you refuse to recognize that. You claim I am “desperate” but clearly that is a description for yourself as you refuse to accept the reality of this planet, specifically the reality of the last 105 years in Greenland.

Omitting the last 105 years of warming is clearly a deception. I do not know is it is voluntary (in that case this a blatant lie) or just self-deceptive willful ignorance.

He claims there was a 2 – 4° temperature rise over the past century, when even the IPCC says the rise was only 0.7°. Contradicting himself, he admits that the 0.7° [natural] rise is a “GLOBAL average.”

Well, DUH!

CAGW alarmists belong to a doomsday cult, the same as Mrs Keech’s flying saucer cult, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses doomsday cult. There is no reasoning with such cognitive dissonance-afflicted alarmists.

CO2 is a total non-problem. But True Believers’ minds are made up and closed tight.

The scientific method would clear things up for them, but nothing can penetrate their belief systems.

Henry@From Peru
Just to be clear on this:
If someone claims that global warming is caused by an increase in carbon dioxide it is actually up to that person making the claim to provide me with the evidence. In this respect I would need to see clear results in the relevant concentration range and it must show how much cooling and how much warming is caused by the CO2. This would have to include the radiative cooling caused by CO2 and the cooling by CO2 caused by taking part in the process of photo synthesis. In fact, I am puzzled why no one, even if it were Anthony or Willis or someone, does not sue people like Al Gore and them in a court of law for making false claims.
So if you make the claim (to me) that carbon dioxide is the cause of global warming, it is up to you to provide me with that evidence. For that, I would expect you to show me exact test results and the method and instruments used to get those results.
People I corresponded with like Weart and Alley, all claim, like you, that those results
do actually exist. Well, I could not find them.
IPPC and them used a system whereby the increase of CO2 and other GHG’s were measured from 1750 to 2005 and then a value of forcing was attributed to each of them according to the warming observed. This would make sense if we knew for sure that GHG’s are the cause of modern warming.
But, surely, that is looking at a problem from the wrong end? That is assuming you know what is causing warming and then working your way back. It is the worst mistake any scientist can make.
To be completely truthful, I did make a similar mistake myself in the past. It happens when you get carried away too much with what you think is right or what you think ought to be.
So, I know what went wrong here. There is a complete lack of actual test results and everybody thought that it must be the CO2, “because what else can it be? There must something that we are doing wrong….” Well actually my finding is that carbon dioxide is good for life and more of it is better….
By saying that CO2 is not the cause of modern warming, I am not saying that warming is not happening. Modern warming could have natural causes or it could have some element being manmade, that is what we have to figure out. If you have read my blog,

and you understand what I am saying there, then it seems that modern warming is definitely not caused by GHG’s, as in that case the minimum temps should show a higher increase. I could not find this in the two examples of weather stations that I looked at (that had some relevant data going back 50-100 years)
Do you have data from stations in Peru? Was Peru not having a very bad winter this year? How many died? Aren’t you worried about that happening again?

Henry, claims: “If someone claims that global warming is caused by an increase in carbon dioxide it is actually up to that person making the claim to provide me with the evidence.” “Well, I could not find them.”

For this 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reviewed 14 global climate models from all major climate centers, and ran many simulations on those climate models using both natural and anthropogenic forcings.

Henry, you’ll find the models reviewed in Chapter 8 (pp. 589-662) and the simulation results with both natural and anthropogen forcings in Chapter 9 (pp. 663f-746).

Oregon Perspective, you said:
“That chart is not “from the Journal of Quaternary Science Reviews”, as you claim. The chart was supposedly put together from Alley’s data by David Lappi, a petroleum geologist from Alaska without any experience in ice cores or climate science. ”

The first sentence of this post by Easterbrook starts with a misleading comparison about the 1930s. It then moves on to some slights of the hand, in which 1905 is described as “the present.” I just don’t see how anyone with a skeptical bone in their bodies would trust the following calculations for which no methods are given. One might also ask whether proxies other than O18, give the same results. O18 may be a useful proxy for temperature, but I would like to see comparisons between O18 and other proxies and even, recent instrumental data, if possible. Would you accept the O18 data so readily and completely if the analysis supported ACW? I like to go back to the original data, where possible. However, Easterbook does not give enough methods to make this possible.

While you were typing, gallopingcamel gave the answer to your question. And you are presuming that Dr Easterbrook is being sly just because he didn’t write his article exactly as you want. That lame argument is simply alarmist projection. Why not write him and ask for his comment? You might learn something.

OTOH, if you want to see outright, provable dishonesty and scientific fraud, you need look no further than MBH98/99, upon which the AR-4 conclusions are based [along with plenty of amateur input from the WWF and other NGOs]. Read A.W. Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion, available along the right sidebar. Then report back on your view of Mann’s outrageous scientific misconduct.

Oregon Perspective says:

“No known mode of internal variability [that is, natural forcing] leads to such widespread, near universal warming as has been observed in the past few decades.”

“Greenhouse gas forcing is the dominant cause of warming during the past several decades.”

Translation: “We do not understand how the climate really works. But we’re getting paid big bucks to conclude that the cause of current climate activity, which cannot be discerned from entirely natural past variability patterns, must be ‘greenhouse’ gases this time around.” That’s about it, eh?

Once again: zero scientific method employed, prominenet appeals to [well paid, biased] authority, rampant conjecture, and claimed consensus. The IPCC puts out anti-science hogwash and calls it science. But science without the scientific method is pseudo-science.

Thank you for a most informative interpretation of climate cycles I believe I may have ever seen that the average person can easily understand. Armed with this info, my kids will be better prepared to defend themselves against the brainwashing attempts of many of their peers and teachers!

I am so glad you know and understand what is going on here.
I am sure you think 89 scientists must be able to somehow come up to you with the answers that you and I have been looking for.
Well, all I need you to tell me eaxactly is how much (radiative) warming and how much (radiative) cooling is caused by the increase of 0,01% CO2 that occurred in the past 50 years.The snag is; I don’t need assumptions, models, and mathematical calculations. I don’t trust those. I want to see actual test results obtained during a real experiment.
The unit is a giveaway:
it must be in W/m2/0.01% CO2/unit of time, for the (radiative) warming and it must be in W/m2/0.01 % CO2/unit of time for the (radiative) cooling
We would also need to know how much cooling is caused by the CO2 by taking part in the process of photo synthesis. Because at the end of the day: the question is what is the net effect of the cooling and warming caused by CO2?
As I said before, the IPCC evaluated “forcing” of each GHG by comparing the increase of GHG’s with the modern warming taking 1750 as the zero point. (see chapter 2 of your quote to me). It is just like they “knew” exactly what was causing warming and started working from there, namely an increase in GHG’s.
they do not have the actual test results that I am looking for.
So it is back to zero (Start). I am saying that GHG’s did not cause modern warming, because of what we see at weather stations: No increase in average minimum temps that matches modern warming. If GHG’s caused modern warming it would have been minimum temps. that should show a steeper increase (heat being trapped during the colder part of the day – night time). Yet, those are flat.http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok

“He claims there was a 2 – 4° temperature rise over the past century, when even the IPCC says the rise was only 0.7°. Contradicting himself, he admits that the 0.7° [natural] rise is a “GLOBAL average.”

Well, DUH!”

We are talking about GREENLAND, since the GISP2 data is from an ice core in GREENLAND. If you compare the ice core temperature proxies from Greenland and then you compare it with the global average instrumental temperature record, you are comparing apples with oranges.

I give you a map that shows a warming between 2ºC and 4ºC in GREENLAND, and a list of the stations in GREENLAND that measured that warming.

It is not clear?

Then you go to say:

“CAGW alarmists belong to a doomsday cult, the same as Mrs Keech’s flying saucer cult, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses doomsday cult. There is no reasoning with such cognitive dissonance-afflicted alarmists.

CO2 is a total non-problem. But True Believers’ minds are made up and closed tight.

The scientific method would clear things up for them, but nothing can penetrate their belief systems.”

You talk abou the scientific method, but you use abundantly half-truths (like mutilated graphs) and flawed comparisons that have nothing to do with the scientific method.

I will wait until your response. If you still doesn’t undestand the difference between GREENLAND and the GLOBE, you really will show that “nothing can penetrate your belief system.”

I referred to the IPCC report because it represents the latest global consensus on climate modeling and CO2..

But each year the United States two major modeling labs, GISS and NCAR also publish 10s of papers in both popular and technical scientific journals describing their approaches to climate modeling, including the impact of CO2. GISS 2010 publications are available here: http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2010/

This article supplies or links the information you claim to want, but claim you are unable to find, including this summary: “Of the 2.9 W/m2 of GHG radiative
forcing from 1750 to 2000, CO2 contributed 1.5 W/m2, methane 0.55 W/m2, and CFCs 0.3 W/m2, with the rest coming from N2O and ozone (15). All of these increases in noncondensing GHG forcing are attributable to human activity.”

Correct observation. The planet has been warmer many times during the Holocene, as tree lines all over the globe show. The current *mild* warming is indistinguishable from those numerous prior warmings.

All the emotional hand-wringing over what is clearly natural climate variability sends some members of the CAGW Doomsday Cult over the edge.

The only verifiable effect of the increase in harmless, beneficial CO2 is increased agricultural productivity. There is no evidence of global harm due to the ≈40% increase in that minor trace gas.

A 40% increase is not insignificant. You would think that there would be some major evidence of global harm as a result. The fact that there is no such verifiable, testable evidence is a strong indication that CO2 is harmless. But some folks are fixated, and they just can’t let go of their repeatedly falsified conjecture.

“Natural climate variability completely explains the rise, with no need for an extraneous variable such as CO2 — which follows rises in temperature. Effect cannot precede cause, and the climate null hypothesis has never been falsified. What we are observing is natural and routine.”

But that’s NOT so in the article this a thread for. Dr. Easterbrook was making comparisons about 2010, while none of the graphs even show the last decade. And as far as Figure 5, the critiques are valid. Dr. Easterbrook very clearly made the statement: “So where do the 1934/1998/2010 warm years rank in the long-term list of warm years? [ referring to Fig. 5 graph!] Of the past 10,500 years, 9,100 were warmer than 1934/1998/2010. [–> FALSE, they were warmer than 1905; check the graph] Thus, regardless of which year ( 1934, 1998, or 2010) turns out to be the warmest of the past century, that year will rank number 9,099 in the long-term list.” [–> false statement].

Pointing this out does NOT make one a “Pro-AGWer”, “alarmist” or what not.

It contains the information you claim to be unable to find, including this summary: “Increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases have led to a post-2000 imbalance at the top of the atmosphere of 0.9 ± 0.5 W m–2 ( 5); it is this imbalance that produces “global warming.””

I remember walking to school in the fall/winter of 1948 and gathering ice off the tops of the cars and making ice-ball to throw at the other kids. This was in Santa Monica, California, about 1 1/2 miles from the Pacific Ocean…….
I’m pretty sure is was that New Years Day parade in Pasadena, that a neighbor girl rode on one of the floats – in a bathing suit – and thought she would freeze to death before it was over!
Found this Online:
“I have a picture of the snowfall (in Pasadena) taken January 1949.”
I guess all those war-time factories had stopped producing C02, so things cooled off.

Oregon P says:
“Of the 2.9 W/m2 of GHG radiative forcing from 1750 to 2000, CO2 contributed 1.5 W/m2, methane 0.55 W/m2, and CFCs 0.3 W/m2, with the rest coming from N2O and ozone (15). All of these increases in noncondensing GHG forcing are attributable to human activity.
But I suspect that is still not enough for you.”

It seems you know why I would not be satisfied? yes, those are the results. But I wanted to know how the experiments were done to get to these results.
The reality I had to consider, is: there are no such results from any such experiments, that gave those measurements, other than the one experiment called ‘planet earth”..
So it is a dudd. From AS to IPPC 2007. The horse is behind the carriage, everywhere.

Here in South Africa we are now just a few hours away from 2011 so I don’t think I will be back here with you again in 2010
Have a wonderful 2011 you all!
may God be with us all, this 2011
(especially those that believe in honesty and truth)

I referred to the IPCC report because it represents the latest global consensus on climate modeling and CO2..

You seem to have some difficulty coming to grips with the concept of “evidence”. Even the creators of all those GCMs freely admit that they are all almost completely inadequate at modeling any part of the role of H2O in the planet’s climate. H2O in its myriad aspects, impacts and influences is, as the primary mediator of the energy that the Sun provides to the Earth, responsible for almost everything that constitutes what we speak of when discussing the weather and climate, including the dubious positive feedbacks which are at the core of the catastrophic projections of the CAGW hypothesis. Until the GCMs model H2O with much more thoroughness than they presently provide for CO2, which despite decades of effort and billions invested is in itself nothing to brag about, running endless iterations of them from now to the next millennium may suggest some new questions to pursue, but will never provide a substantial answer to any of the questions which have already been asked.

Smokey, Henry, Bill, and even Easterbrook are is just [snip] you on this. They are saying that hundreds of climate research scientists, who have published their methods, data, and analysis in 1000s of research articles are wrong. But Smokey, Henry, Bill, and Easterbrook, who have done none of that, are right. They’re not.

The giveaway is in the first sentence of Easterbrook’s article, which begins “1934 has long been considered the warmest year of the past century.” Easterbrook is either [snip ~ ad hom]. 1934 was only one of the warmest years of the past century in the United States. 1934 was not a warm year around the world. You can see that difference in figures 1 and 4 at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/

So Easterbrook either, unknowlingly cherry-picked his data, or [snip]. That’s propaganda, not science.

The same is true of his use of the GISP2 data. Easterbrook, Smokey, and Bill pretend that the Greenland ice core temperatures are representative of global temperatures. Even Alley, who gathered that data says they are not. Again, [snip].

I don’t think this individuals are interested in testing their ideas against the evidence, which is what science does. They are merely cherry-picking or misrepresenting evidence to make their ideas (whereever they come from) seem respectable, without publishing them where knowledgeable peers can respond.

Neither Easterbrook’s first sentence nor his paper would survive peer-review. Not because of a conspiracy of climate research scientists. But because some people care about honestly testing ideas against evidence, and other people don’t.

GISS and NCAR have 100s of publications with methods, data, and analysis to back up there conclusions. This bunch doesn’t.

It doesn’t usually take long to figure out who your talking to.

[And your grammar would not survive peer-review in fourth grade. On the other hand read this posting, which hardly commends peer review.

Note – your comment above has been languishing in the spam queue. Continued postings in this vein are likely to earn similar treatment. Commenters here are expected to adhere to the blog policy (under About WUWT tab at top) about Ad Hominem and to add to the discussion, not just rubbish the guest author’s and other commenters’ opinions ~jove, mod]

[Reply from another moderator: Dr Easterbrook is well respected professionally, and has generously offered to write this article. Having read your comments that were snipped by moderator jove, please take this as a warning. Further vicious personal attacks like the ones snipped will result in your future posts being sent straight to the spam bucket. ~dbs, mod.]

Dr. Easterbrook,
Thanks for a great post.
Have you ever studied the volcanic activity – relative to the warming – cooling, over the past 10,000years?
As a design professional, attempting to use the best possible information in my practice, I am deeply appreciative of your efforts.
I have been pleased (so far) with my ‘overgain’ passive solar designs.
I design in ‘overgain’ to force natural ventilation – if global cooling becomes an issue – these structures will no longer be quite so independent of the back-up heating systems.
I will continue my study.
Have a great new year!
Not Another Architect

Someone reminded me recently that I used to point out we were far below the 10,000-year average, so wake me up when we get *that* high… and this was back in the late 1990s.

I wish I knew where I’d got that data, though I did a big research project on the subject about 1998, I don’t have the source for that factoid handy.

My only point was that the general fact of where we lie in the long term has been known (and ignored by CAGW boosters) for quite a long time. I got it from someone else’s research, I didn’t come up with those facts on my own.

So many people have made CAGW a career, however, that even if it’s debunked it will be like ending the income tax – most the accountants and the IRS would be out of work, so they fight like heck against the very idea.

Henry@oregon P
You now resort to name calling because you feel threathened.
I am guessing here that your livelyhood depends on the lies about global warming being true. I do understand that you are angry. Unfortunately I cannot change the truth. It is all here. All the facts.http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok

The average temps. we have today is still lower than the average temperature of the last 10000 years during which most of humanity developed.
Our (religious) forefathers tried to stop the truth from spreading, that the earth was a round ball and not in the centre of the universe. In the end they did not succeed. ..
they forgot that Jesus (God) is the truth. The truth does have this habit of making an appearance every so often. Better be prepared for that. Look for another job while you still can?
If you do not accept my findings, bring your arguments.
Otherwise those here who know the truth are simply going to shrug and say: there are none so blind as those who do not want to see…..

Reading the sceptics of climate science is like reading the sceptics of evolution for me, a non-scientist. Ya’ll are nitpicking to find any little thing to scream “discrepancy” and ignoring the larger picture. In the case of evolution, the larger picture is “what can we learn about human nature and how can we use that to improve our condition?” In the case of climate science, it is “how have we humans impacted our environment and what can we do to lessen the impact or turn it into a neutral or positive rather than a harmful effect?” It doesn’t seem to me (again, I am a non-scientist) that the effluents we have been spewing into our atmosphere, oceans, and land for the last 150 years especially, are particularly benign whether they result in overall warming or not. The point is to clean up our act, not to split hairs over data that may or may not be ambiguous. If you LIKE breathing smog or absorbing radiation or ingesting toxic chemicals, fine. If you make money off of activities that result in these ill effects, your bias is noted. However, the rest of us have a vested interest in our own and the planet’s continued good health and survival. So nitpick all you want, the vast majority of us want the industrialized world to clean up our act and the time to begin it is a couple or five decades ago, or at the latest, NOW, but not “never.”

henry@p-moment
It appears you missed the point that CO2 is not a pollutant.http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
Everything you ate and drank today (except if it were pure water)
depends on carbon dioxide.
We need more of that, not less.
You can filter out all other evils
(CO,SO2, heavy metals)
but please put more CO2 in the air
not less.

Milankovitch clearly explained that 10,000 year until now shows a decrease in Northern Hemisphere summer irradiance. Greenland thus received significantly more solar energy in the summer than it does not. It’s actually surprising that the reduction in solar irradiance over the past 10,000 years did not cause more cooling. Now that the Arctic is warming up 4 C in the past couple of decades, after cooling according to Milankocitch cycles for a few degrees over 10,000 years, it is clear that something truely profoundly different is diving the recent warming in the Arctic.

Henry@Rob
It appears to me that the entire Holocene — the period over which, by some odd coincidence, humanity developed agriculture and civilization — the temperature has been higher than now, and the trend over the past 4000 years is a marked decline. From this perspective, it’s the LIA that was unusual, and the current warming trend simply represents a return to the mean.
Perhaps do some real research yourself?http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok

They must have worked out some calibration method
e.g. the last graph in the article clearly shows the Roman warm period,
at the correct year hundred
which was known in England,
it was why the Romans could conquer England
If the rings are not years, then what do they represent?

And now using the data missing in the mutilated graph (the last 100 years that show a warming of 3ºC), temperatures in Greenland now are 2ºC warmer than in the Medieval Warm Period and 1ºC warmer than in the Roman Warm Period, and tied with the temperatures in the Minoan Warm Period and the Holocene Maximum.

That is, temperatures unprecedented (in Greenland) in the last 3400 years!

This is a point that is missing in the Dr. Don J. Easterbrook post.

Now I make this question again (nobody has even tried to answer it, someone just denied* that there has been 3ºC of warming in Greenland, showing that he cannot tell the difference between regional and global warming):

(NOTE: when I used the verb “denied*”, I do NOT call “denier” someone, only decribe what has been doing in his comments, that is negating the evidence.)

Why has Greenland warmed to levels near those seen in the most warm periods in the Holocene, given that Milanktovich Cycles has been in a cooling trend for millenia?

Care to actually put a figure on what you think the average global temperature of the last 10k years is and how you derived it? So we can, you know, check your working, compare it to today and see if your claim stands up?

The irrational nonsense that is perpetuated on this site is alarming. It has already been noted in various comments that 1934 is not one of the warmest years on record globally. Confusing USA with the globe is an ignorant mistake. At least make a correction when it is pointed out. Just as the USA is not the world, neither is Greenland. And why do you perpetuate the bogus contention that the globe has cooled since 1998? This past decade was the warmest in the instrumental record. Every global temperature record shows a warming trend since 1998. For those of you who are confused, no climate scientist predicts a monotonic warming inline with CO2 increase. You are cherry picking data and arguing with straw men. Stop it and get back to reality!

“The irrational nonsense that is perpetuated on this site is alarming. (…) And why do you perpetuate the bogus contention that the globe has cooled since 1998? This past decade was the warmest in the instrumental record. Every global temperature record shows a warming trend since 1998. For those of you who are confused, no climate scientist predicts a monotonic warming inline with CO2 increase. You are cherry picking data and arguing with straw men. Stop it and get back to reality!”

Well said!

It seems that some people simply can’t (or more precisely, doesn’t want to) undestand this facts!

If picking 1998 is cherry-picking [which I agree it is], then to avoid that problem we should look at various, and longer, time frames. [Incidentally, picking “the instrumental record” is no different than cherry-picking 1998.]

My preference is the Holocene, which is generally accepted as the beginning of the current interglacial. It covers the past ≈10,000 years, and so avoids picking one particular year, or even a few decades.

Also, I agree that Greenland is a specific region. So to make the discussion global, we will add the Antarctic. The Vostok ice cores correlate well with GISP-2 in Greenland [as do other ice core locations], so we can be reasonably certain that unusually warm or cold periods like the MWP and the LIA were global events.

Looking at a chart of Greenland’s temperatures during the Holocene, we see that it was considerably warmer than up to a century and a half ago, when the ice core record stops due to the fact that annual snow cover has not yet compacted into ice.

Keep in mind that the temperature rise over the past ±150 years is widely accepted to be ≈0.7°C. That shows us that Greenland has been significantly warmer than today during much of the Holocene.

In addition, there is physical evidence showing that rises in CO2 follow rises in temperature. There appears to be an ≈800 year lag between temperature rises and CO2 rises at millennial time scales. That would attribute much of the curent CO2 rise to the MWP.

And although increased CO2 will cause some minor global warming, it must be kept in mind that the past century’s 0.7°C rise was caused at least in part by the planet’s emergence from the LIA. It is baseless conjecture to attribute 100% of that relatively insignificant rise entirely to CO2. And there is no doubt that more CO2 has resulted in increased agricultural yields; more CO2 is clearly beneficial to the biosphere.

Further, the IPCC’s own figures show that the anthropogenic portion of CO2 emissions is dwarfed by the planet’s natural emissions.

Next, the climate’s sensitivity to CO2 must be a small number, very likely less than 1°C per doubling. If the sensitivity number were large [eg: the IPCC’s preposterous 3 – 6°C], then the temperature would closely track changes in CO2. This is obviously not the case. There is little correlation between temperature and CO2 at short time scales, therefore climate sensitivity to CO2 must be small. QED

So we see a few things in these graphs. First, we are in an interglacial period, where global temperatures have routinely been much higher than they are now. We see that the normal condition of the planet is glacial. We see that natural variability fully explains the current climate, with no necessity for a minor extraneous variable such as CO2. We see that during the Holocene temperatures have been much higher than today’s pleasant climate. And by adding the 0.7°C warming since the Industrial Revolution onto the GISP-2 evidence, we see that temperatures of 2 – 3°C higher than curent were commonplace; the claim that current temperatures were anywhere near the Minoan Optimum are baseless nonsense.

Therefore, your statement that “The irrational nonsense that is perpetuated on this site is alarming” is falsified. The facts that have been presented in these graphs are neither irrational, nor are they nonsense.

The question that must be answered by the alarmist crowd is this: what empirical, testable evidence shows that actual global harm has resulted from the [not-insignificant] ≈40% rise in CO2? With such a large increase, if CO2 were harmful, there would already be noticeable damage to the planet.

Yet there is no such evidence.

The conclusion: CO2 is both harmless and beneficial at these levels. The CO2=CAGW scare is debunked, and all the references to “carbon”, “carbon footprint”, “carbon credits”, and so on, are based on pseudo-science, and on the refusal to adhere to the scientific method.

What Smokey just said here on this site would simply have been wiped at any pro-AGW site. I know. I have been there, done that. They just did not give me the T-shirt.

So if you find the irrational nonsense perpetuated on this site alarming, why don’t you go back there? Any type of story will be allowed there, as long as it supports the argument that man made carbon dioxide is evil. Unfortunately it will change nothing to the truth. I hope you realize that?

“Keep in mind that the temperature rise over the past ±150 years is widely accepted to be ≈0.7°C.”

You are again confusing GLOBAL temperatures (that have indeed warmed 0.7ºC) with REGIONAL temperatures in Greenland, that have warmed between 2ºC and 4ºC. It is so difficult to understand?

“That shows us that Greenland has been significantly warmer than today during much of the Holocene”

This is quite false, now we are at temperatures as high as in the Minoan Warm Period and the Holocene Maximum in GREENLAND.

“And by adding the 0.7°C warming since the Industrial Revolution onto the GISP-2 evidence, we see that temperatures of 2 – 3°C higher than curent were commonplace; the claim that current temperatures were anywhere near the Minoan Optimum are baseless nonsense”

What is nonsense is comparing the GLOBAL temperatures with the REGIONAL paleoclimate data in GREENLAND. You are comparing apples with oranges. The temperatures in Greenland are near the temperatures of the Minoan Warm Period (or even warmer).

“In addition, there is physical evidence showing that rises in CO2 follow rises in temperature. There appears to be an ≈800 year lag between temperature rises and CO2 rises at millennial time scales.”

That is a positive, amplyifing feedfack. What it shows is that warming (that in the past was caused by Milanktovich Cycles) liberates CO2 from the ocean. This in turn generates more warming. This is one of the mechanisms that explains why the mild forcing from Milancktovich cycles can drive the planet from ice ages to interglacials and viceversa.

“That would attribute much of the curent CO2 rise to the MWP”

This is total nonsense. The current rise, equal to the difference between glacial and interglacial periods, cannot be explained by the small warming of the MWP. The oceans now are net absorbers, not emitters, of CO2; as a result, the ocean acidity has increased by 30%. If the ocean warming were the cause of the rise of CO2 , the acidity would have dropped, not increased. Obviously this monstruous rise in CO2 is caused by the emission of CO2 from fossil fuel burning, that is ocurring at a rate not seen in billions of years.

“The question that must be answered by the alarmist crowd is this: what empirical, testable evidence shows that actual global harm has resulted from the [not-insignificant] ≈40% rise in CO2? With such a large increase, if CO2 were harmful, there would already be noticeable damage to the planet.

Yet there is no such evidence. ”

Have you read the extensive literature about the alarming events that are happening right now in the planet?

Are you aware that summertime Arctic sea ice volume has dropped by 80%?

What about the accelerating meltdown of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, 100 years ahead of what climate models predicted?

Careful, there, Peru me boy, you’ll frighten yourself to death. Your arguments are the usual warmist Argumentum ad Ignorantium: “If I can’t think of any other reason than CO2 to blame, then the cause must be CO2!” You’re simply ignorant of the many other possible causes of fluctuating temperatures.

There is not one event that can conclusively be blamed on the rise in CO2. It is entirely speculation, based on your Argumentum ad Ignorantium. When you return to the echo chamber you came from, you will feel comfortable, because they don’t believe in the scientific method. Here, you will get set straight.

See, we’re talking about global warming on this “Best Science” site. By disregarding the numerous charts from various sources that I posted, you can’t understand that I was showing various global locations that all show the same thing: the planet was warmer many times in the past.

All available evidence [as opposed to models, which are not evidence] shows that during the Holocene there were numerous times when global temperatures were significantly higher than they are today. Since that fact destroys the CAGW argument, you simply ignore the evidence, and fall back on your ridiculous assertions that this is as warm as it has ever been in the Holocene. Cognitive dissonance at work.

The alarmist contingent still refuses to avbide by the scientific method, but relies instead on a mythical “consensus” to support their true belief. Thirteen years after MBH98, serial liar Michael Mann still refuses to disclose his data, methodologies and metadata that he based his Hokey Stick chart on. Mann’s chart has been repeatedly debunked, and only his credulous followers still believe in it. Mann’s chart attempted to erase the MWP and LIA, against mountains of evidence to the contrary.

You are doing the same thing, by preposterously claiming that the Minoan Optimum was no warmer than today. CO2=CAGW is your conjecture. You own it, and you have the onus of proving it. Yet you cannot demonstrate any harm that CO2 has caused the planet.

You complain about regional examples – then you use the Arctic region as global evidence. Global ice cover is about average because the Antarctic holds almost 90% of the world’s ice — and Antarctic ice is expanding. Global CO2 affects temperature everywhere. But you cherry-pick one lame example: the Arctic region. Is that the best you can do?

Keep in mind that scientific skeptics have nothing to prove. The onus is entirely on the alarmist crowd to convincingly show that their conjecture explains reality better than the null hypothesis – which has never been falsified – while the alternate CAGW hypothesis has been repeatedly falsified. That is why it has been downgraded to the level of conjecture.

Trying to claim that today’s mild temperature is as warm as the Roman, Minoan and Holocene Optimum makes you sound like a raving lunatic. It is a ridiculous and erroneous statement with no basis in fact. Best to stop digging before you reach China, and have to turn around.

@Henry,
You may have misunderstood my comment. Milankovitch cycles clearly a decline in Northern Hemisphere summer solar irradiance over the past 10 millennia, which is consistent with the decline in Greenland temperatures. The LIA is only the end of that decline, where it may be noted that probably the Mounder Minimum contributed (some -0.2 C) to the already low NH temperaratures.
So it is no surpise that temperatures in Greenland declined over the past 10 millennia, and during the LIA as well.

So the 20th Century warming (of +0.8 C globally) is the real ‘unusual’ period during the Holocene, and especially the current rate of increase (some +0.2 C/decade global, and +0.3 C/decade in the NH) is completely inconsistent with the Milankovitch cycles and solar activity alike.

“All available evidence [as opposed to models, which are not evidence] shows that during the Holocene there were numerous times when global temperatures were significantly higher than they are today. Since that fact destroys the CAGW argument, you simply ignore the evidence, and fall back on your ridiculous assertions that this is as warm as it has ever been in the Holocene.”

No, the fact the globe was possibly, or even likely warmer during certain periods compared to now during the Holocene does not in any way refute the CO2 induced global warming theory. The globe has warmed and cooled for various reasons in the past, but the current warming is most likely caused by increases of GHG, especially CO2. Your assertion that the current rise in CO2 concentrations was caused by the MWP is preposterous! You linked to a graph of temperature and CO2 variations derived form Antarctic ice cores. It shows that in the last 400,000 years CO2 levels did not rise above 300 ppm in the midst of big temperature swings, and you think a little bit of warming a few hundred years ago caused the recent 100 ppm spike! We are upsetting the equilibrium of the carbon cycle by pulling carbon that has been sitting in the earth for millions of years and pumping it into the atmosphere. WE are causing the spike in atmospheric CO2 concentration! We need to reign in this massive global experiment by reducing our output of GHG.

Thankfully Peru already noted many of false notions that you entertain. I am sorry for sounding a little harsh, Smokey. Unfortunately I don’t have time to continue this conversation. But I hope that you will spend a little more time reading actual scientific literature about climate change, rather than putting your faith in blog science.

Henry@bgood2creation
You say: The globe has warmed and cooled for various reasons in the past, but the current warming is most likely caused by increases of GHG, especially CO2.

this is allegation is simply wrong

For example,
if you study the pattern of the warming, for example,
like here, we have some average temperature data since 1946,
This is in Spain, which I think is pretty much average as average goes for a place to stay on earth! The station has been very accurate in its recordings and only one day’s recordings are missing. Note that the average minimum temps. since 1980 have stayed constant. If green house gasses were to blame for the warming (the trapping of heat), you would think that it should have been minimum temps that would show the increase (of modern warming). But that line is completely straight…..So it cannot be greenhouse gases that caused modern warming. It must be something else that is causing warming…..obviously.
Similarly, another weather station that showed no significant increase in minimum temperatures during the past 200 years is that of Armagh in Northern Ireland. http://www.arm.ac.uk/preprints/445.pdf

The article is simply not scholarly by any stretch. Don manages to contradict his own research web page above. Above he notes that “1999 to 2010 global cooling. No global warming has occurred above the 1998 level and temperatures have declined slightly.” However, on his glacier fluctuations research web page he notes instead “For example, the present warm period (1977–2007) is slightly
warmer than the 1920–1950 warm period, and the 1947–1977 cool cycle” Try to fit those two statements. That material from others is not accurately represented or credited is apparent at this same research website. His figure 14C and 15C are pictures I took. The terminus lines are ones I denoted on the images. The dates for the lines are not correct- for 15Cm it is 1985, see Boulder Glacier third image discussed here Blog post on Boulder Glacier
For 14C the date stamp from my picture is still evident and the date is 1985 as well. Easton Glacier.

There is the null hypothesis of natural climate variability, which has never been falsified, and there is the alternate CO2=CAGW conjecture, which has been repeatedly falsified — not least by the planet itself.

You must first understand the basic differences between a conjecture, a hypothesis and a theory. Theories can make accurate predictions. But no model has been accurate in predicting the future climate: the table shows one correct model prediction, vs 27 wrong predictions. Therefore, model guesses are at the level of conjecture; they are an opinion, based on the programmer’s bias; GIGO: garbage in, globaloney out. Further, models are not scientific evidence. They are a tool, nothing more — and not very good tools at that.

You look at a chart and come away with exactly the opposite conclusion that any rational person would arrive at: you say that “in the last 400,000 years CO2 levels did not rise above 300 ppm in the midst of big temperature swings…”

That shows beyond any doubt that CO2 is not the driver of the climate. While CO2 remained flat, the global temperature varied widely. But with CO2 ≈40% higher over the past century and a half, temperatures are still well within their normal and natural parameters, and there is no testable, empirical evidence proving that CO2 has caused any harm to the planet. None. CO2 makes no discernable difference. As a matter of fact, current temperatures are unusually mild.

CO2 has no measurable, testable, quantifiable effect on temperature, no matter how much you wish it were so. The fact that the climate sensitivity number is still debated is a direct consequence of not being able to measure or quantify a unit of temperature change resulting from a unit of CO2 emitted. If something cannot be measured, it fails the scientific method. It’s that simple. Without the scientific method, it is only pseudo-science.

It’s embarassing to read someone parroting alarmist talking points here without understanding the basics. To get up to speed on the actual science, I recommend you do an archive search for “CO2″. Read all the articles and comments. There are a lot of them. The CO2/temperature conflation has been extensively discussed, and the only reliable correlation is that CO2 follows temperature. It will take a couple of days to catch up, but you will start to get an understanding of the situation. As of right now, you are simply repeating incorrect information based on alarmist talking points, without having a basic understanding of the issue.

After studying these particualr graphs, I became skeptical of global warming as such being a problem. I know mine is still a minority view. But to change my mind, you willl first have to show me that warming in the past has caused catastrophes and huge problems. Until then, I’m not going to believe that warming in the future will cause catastrophes and huge problems, especially warming that we can barely measure. Now the opposite, global cooling, that really is something to worry about….
Note that if you look at the fourth graph, it is clear that our current temperature, even though on the incline, is still far below the average of the last 10000 years, when, by some co-incidence(?), most of humanity and civilization developed. In fact, temps. are still declining from about 4000 years ago. This is something often overlooked by those believing global warming is bad for us, and mostly willfully ignored by those whose livelyhoods depend on it.
In this respect it was the LIA that was unusual and modern warming simply looks like a return to the mean. Lucky for us!!
Ice ages are not something to look forward to….
In any case: all nothing to do with the CO2. More CO2 is good for us. It simply brings better crops and more food on the table.

Henry said: “To change my mind, you will first have to show me that warming in the past has caused catastrophes and huge problems. Until then, I’m not going to believe that warming in the future will cause catastrophes and huge problems”

Here’s a list of animals that went extinct in North America during the warming period at the end of the Pleistocene: “Giant sloths; short faced bears; giant polar bears; California tapirs; peccaries; the American lion; giant condors; Miracinonyx (“American cheetahs”, not true cheetahs); saber-toothed cats like Xenosmilus, Smilodon and the scimitar cat; Homotherium;[3] dire wolves; saiga; camelids such as two species of now extinct llamas and Camelops;[4] at least two species of bison; stag-moose; the shrub-ox and Harlan’s muskox; horses; mammoths and mastodons; and giant beavers as well as birds like teratorns. In contrast today the largest North American land animal is the American bison.”*

Here’s a list of animals that went extinct in South America during the warming period at the end of the Pleistocene: Giant ground sloth, Megatherium, the camel-like litoptern Macrauchenia, Cuvieronius, Stegomastodon, Doedicurus, Glyptodon, Hippidion and Toxodon, and the Smilodon.*

Here’s a list of animals that went extinct in Australia during the warming period at the end of the Pleistocene: “Short-faced kangaroo (Procoptodon goliah), Diprotodon (a giant wombat), the Marsupial Lion (Thylacoleo carnifex), the flightless birds Genyornis and Dromornis, the 5-meter snake Wonambi and the giant lizard, the megalania”.*

Here’s a list of animals that went extinct in Asia during the warming period at the end of the Pleistocene: “Woolly mammoth, straight-tusked elephant, aurochs, cave lion, cave bear, Cave hyena, Irish elk, woolly rhinoceros, Merck´s rhinoceros, narrow-nosed rhinoceros, and Elasmotherium”.*

And Henry, those are just the large animals, that leave dramatic fossil evidence of their extinction (*see the Wikipedia page on Pleistocene megafauna). The number of smaller animal species and of plant species both large and small that went extinct in the warming period at the end of of the Pleistocene is larger still.

I would think that these continent-wide extinctions of tens of species following an earlier period global warming would meet any reasonable person’s definition of a “catastrophe” or “huge problem”.

I think that this evidence of catastrophes resulting from global warming in the past might cause to a reasonable person to wonder whether warming in the future might cause catastrophes, as well.

“Here’s a list of large animals that went extinct in North America during the warming period at the end of the Pleistocene: “Giant sloths; short faced bears; giant polar bears; California tapirs; peccaries; the American lion; giant condors; Miracinonyx (“American cheetahs”, not true cheetahs); saber-toothed cats like Xenosmilus, Smilodon and the scimitar cat; Homotherium;[3] dire wolves; saiga; camelids such as two species of now extinct llamas and Camelops;[4] at least two species of bison; stag-moose; the shrub-ox and Harlan’s muskox; horses; mammoths and mastodons; and giant beavers as well as birds like teratorns. In contrast today the largest North American land animal is the American bison.”*

Here’s a list of large animals that went extinct in South America during the warming period at the end of the Pleistocene: Giant ground sloth, Megatherium, the camel-like litoptern Macrauchenia, Cuvieronius, Stegomastodon, Doedicurus, Glyptodon, Hippidion and Toxodon, and the Smilodon.*

Here’s a list of large animals that went extinct in Australia during the warming period at the end of the Pleistocene: “Short-faced kangaroo (Procoptodon goliah), Diprotodon (a giant wombat), the Marsupial Lion (Thylacoleo carnifex), the flightless birds Genyornis and Dromornis, the 5-meter snake Wonambi and the giant lizard, the megalania”.*

Here’s a list of large animals that went extinct in Asia during the warming period at the end of the Pleistocene: “Woolly mammoth, straight-tusked elephant, aurochs, cave lion, cave bear, Cave hyena, Irish elk, woolly rhinoceros, Merck´s rhinoceros, narrow-nosed rhinoceros, and Elasmotherium”.*

—…—…

And here is the list of relationships between the increase in temperature (of some 2 degrees) and the disappearance of that list of large animals…. Zero. The increase in temperature would INCREASE the survivability and food and living area available to those large mammals.

Here is the reason they all died so rapidly: HUMANS moved in to their formerly isolated habitats killed them. Why did these humans kill them, and not smaller creatures? First and foremost, your ancestors ate them for food – or killed them as rivals for food – or killed them as rivals for life. In NO case can you establish any link between temperature and their death. In EVERY case we can immediately relate new human populations with the large animal deaths.

Small animals? Simple. On continental-sized areas, no one, even now, can kill enough of small critters to destroy them. Small critters are not a threat to survival either (disease not being known at the time and so even diseases or fleas and malaria or yellow fever was not a reason to kill even rats, mice, or vermin or insects.)

On islands? Easy. But on continent-sized areas? It has NOT happened even today.

I noticed something interesting in the 10,000 years Greenland ice core temperatures chart. The three sharp drop in climate temperatures (circa 8400 BC; circa 4700 BC; and circa 1300 to 1100 BC) and a bit dip in between 850 and 750 BC in the beginning period of the Little Ice Age. Also something about a time period within the Minoan warming.

The 8400 BC drop seem to correlate to a major volcanic eruption elsewhere in the world in that time frame? Or an asteroid or comet crashing on Earth?

The 4700 BC drop seem to correlate to the supposed origin story of Genesis in the Bible? The sinking of Atlantis before 4700 BC?

The 1300-1100 BC drop seem to correlate to the Exodus (Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt and into the promised land)?

The 850-750 BC dip seem to correlate to the sack of Troy and the founding of Rome?

The Minoan Warming period seems very interesting – it might be a period of time when there was the biblical flood occurred as told in the Bible? (Between 3500 to 3200 BC – melting of the remaining ice glacier shelves led to the great flooding?)

Just an interesting observation. Climate changes have proven to directly or indirectly influenced key religious and political events throughout human history.

Oregon Perspective once again falls into the fallacy of the Argumentum ad Ignorantium: “Since I can’t think of another cause of these extinctions, then they must be due to global warming.” It is literally an argument from ignorance, and your response easily debunked it.

Extinctions happen all the time, constantly — otherwise, we would have pre-historic, pre-human and pre-SUV acheropterix still flying around witth their rudimentary feathers.

What’s really scary is that that is the best argument the alarmist contingent can produce.

Science conclusions are based on peer-reviewed evidence and reason, not on mere opinions. You have many opinions, but little evidence.

For example, Henry, where is your evidence that climate change was not a major factor in megafaunal extinction with global warming. You cite none.

The scientific community does agree on the reality of those extinctions, but does not agree on their cause. For example, see Haynes G, 2009. American Megafaunal Extinctions at the End of the Pleistocene.

The scientific community does agree “that global climate change, which is anthropogenic in origin, is progressing at a speed that is unprecedented at least during the last 22,000 years.” And that will effect the ability of individual species of plants and animals in the natural world to survive.

For my evidence for that opinion, based on ice cores see:
Rates of change in natural and anthropogenic radiative forcing over the past 20,000 years. Fortunat Joos and Renato Spahni. PNAS, February 5, 2008, vol. 105, no. 5, 1425–1430 (at http://assets0.pubget.com/pdf/18252830.pdf)

Here’s the summary:
“The rate of change of climate codetermines the global warming
impacts on natural and socioeconomic systems and their capabilities
to adapt. Establishing past rates of climate change from
temperature proxy data remains difficult given their limited spatio-temporal
resolution. In contrast, past greenhouse gas radiative
forcing, causing climate to change, is well known from ice cores.
We compare rates of change of anthropogenic forcing with rates
of natural greenhouse gas forcing since the Last Glacial Maximum
and of solar and volcanic forcing of the last millennium. The
smoothing of atmospheric variations by the enclosure process of
air into ice is computed with a firn diffusion and enclosure model.
The 20th century increase in CO2 and its radiative forcing occurred
more than an order of magnitude faster than any sustained change
during the past 22,000 years. The average rate of increase in the
radiative forcing not just from CO2 but from the combination of
CO2, CH4, and N2O is larger during the Industrial Era than during
any comparable period of at least the past 16,000 years. In addition,
the decadal-to-century scale rate of change in anthropogenic
forcing is unusually high in the context of the natural forcing
variations (solar and volcanoes) of the past millennium. Our analysis
implies that global climate change, which is anthropogenic in
origin, is progressing at a speed that is unprecedented at least
during the last 22,000 years.”

Where are your citations of peer-reviewed evidence for your many opinions?

You’ve asked for experimental data showing the effect of changes in CO2 on global temperatures. Many research papers have addressed that question, which is why the scientific community is in consensus, and in disagreement with you, on CO2’s effect.

A comparison of past global atmosphere’s from ice cores with corresponding global temperatures is one way scientists have thoroughly addressed this question. A very detailed, 36-page analysis from NASA in 2008 is an excellent example of that kind of work: http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2008/2008_Hansen_etal.pdf.

Can you cite anything comparable to defend your point of view?

To quote from the above:
“Decreasing CO2 was the main cause of a cooling trend that began 50 million years ago, the planet being nearly ice-free until CO2 fell to 450 ± 100 ppm. Barring prompt policy changes, that critical level will be passed, in the opposite direction, within decades. If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm, but likely less than that. If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.”

Can you cite a comparable study of the dynamic relationship between past global atmospheres and and associated global temperatures?

This paper also answers your earlier question about why observed temperature changes have not been greater:
“How long does it take to reach equilibrium temperature
with a specified GHG change? Response is slowed by ocean
thermal inertia and the time needed for ice sheets to disintegrate.
Ocean-caused delay is estimated in Fig. (S7) using a
coupled atmosphere-ocean model. One-third of the response
occurs in the first few years, in part because of rapid response
over land, one-half in ~25 years, three-quarters in 250
years, and nearly full response in a millennium.”

What is your citation for the expected response time to changes in GHG?

“Careful, there, Peru me boy, you’ll frighten yourself to death. Your arguments are the usual warmist Argumentum ad Ignorantium: “If I can’t think of any other reason than CO2 to blame, then the cause must be CO2!” You’re simply ignorant of the many other possible causes of fluctuating temperatures.”

Please explain what are those ” many other possible causes” that have caused Global Warming as well as a regional warming in Greenland unprecedented in the last 3300 years.

“All available evidence [as opposed to models, which are not evidence]…”

I have been talking about DATA , both instrumental and paleoclimatological. The so-called “skeptics” love to accuse the climate scientists of relying only on models, but that is quite false. They use DATA, as well as models (that are tested against the data. If the data contradict them, the models are rejected)

“… shows that during the Holocene there were numerous times when global temperatures were significantly higher than they are today.”

There is significal regional variability in past temperatures. The Medieval Warm Period, for example, was warmer than today in the North Atlantic, but cooler in the Tropical Pacific.

This is quite false. The holocene thermal maximum (HTM) was warmer than the 20th century average , as the Kaufman paper concludes: “At the 16 terrestrial
sites where quantitative estimates have been reported, temperatures (mainly summer estimates) were 1.6 +/- 0.8ºC higher during the HTM than present (approximately the average 20th century)”.

This in no way contradicts climate science. Higher temperatures in the past occurred in respose to past climate forcing, mainly changes in insolation, either from Milancktovich cycles for the Holocene Thermal Maximum or Solar Activity for the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. This past warming and cooling events permit to determine the climate sensitivity to forcing changes. If, as the “skeptics” consistently affirm, the temperature reconstructions are wrong and the HTM and the MWP were indeed warmer than the reconstructions indicate, this means that the climate sensitivity is bigger than the climate scientists estimate (that is, a lot more than 3ºC per doubling of CO2), so future warming will be greater than the climate models, (that use a 3ºC per doubling of CO2 climate sensitivity) indicate.

“you simply ignore the evidence”
As the sample of the literature that I have shown indicate, this is not true. This sentence describe you, that ignore the last 105 years of warming in Greenland.

“and fall back on your ridiculous assertions that this is as warm as it has ever been in the Holocene.Trying to claim that today’s mild temperature is as warm as the Roman, Minoan and Holocene Optimum makes you sound like a raving lunatic. It is a ridiculous and erroneous statement with no basis in fact. ”

Your personal attacks against me are a perfect decription of yourself. The DATA shows that in Greenland the last 100 years have warmed between 2º

Your personal attacks against me are a perfect decription of yourself. The DATA shows that in Greenland the last 100 years have warmed between 2º C and 4ºC , no matter if you don’t like it. Your chart end in 1905. For the decade 2000-2010 the anomaly with respect to 1900-1910 is:

And before you accuse me of focusing just on the Arctic (that is where Dr. Don J. Easterbrook obtained the data, because the GISP2 isotope data is from GREENLAND) the same article shows ACCELERATING ICE SHEET MELTDOWN IN ANTARTICA from GRACE data.

But you can ignore the evidence if you like. The millions of people that live in low elevation coasts not, they will have to move to higher elevations, with incalculable socio-economic costs.

“You look at a chart and come away with exactly the opposite conclusion that any rational person would arrive at: you say that ‘in the last 400,000 years CO2 levels did not rise above 300 ppm in the midst of big temperature swings…’

That shows beyond any doubt that CO2 is not the driver of the climate.”

No, it shows that CO2 is not the only driver of climate. Milankovitch cycles initiated the warming, and CO2 increases amplified it. Here are a few statements from Caillon et al 2003:

“This confirms that CO2 is not the forcing that initially drives the climatic system during a deglaciation. Rather, deglaciation is probably initiated by some insolation
forcing (1, 31, 32), which influences first the temperature change in Antarctica (and possibly in part of the Southern Hemisphere) and then the CO2. This sequence of events is still in full agreement with the idea that CO2 plays, through its greenhouse effect, a key role in amplifying the initial orbital forcing. First, the 800-year time lag is short in comparison with the total duration of the temperature and CO2 increases (5000 years). Second, the CO2 increase clearly precedes the Northern Hemisphere
deglaciation (Fig. 3).”

and

“Finally, the situation at Termination III differs from the recent anthropogenic CO2 increase. As recently noted by Kump (38), we should distinguish between internal influences (such as the deglacial CO2 increase) and external influences (such as the anthropogenic CO2 increase) on the climate system. Although the recent CO2 increase has clearly been imposed first, as a result of anthropogenic activities, it
naturally takes, at Termination III, some time for CO2 to outgas from the ocean once it starts to react to a climate change that is first felt in the atmosphere. The sequence of events during this Termination is fully consistent with CO2 participating
in the latter 4200 years of the warming. The radiative forcing due to CO2 may serve
as an amplifier of initial orbital forcing, which is then further amplified by fast atmospheric feedbacks (39) that are also at work for the presentday and future climate.”

Even Richard Lindzen says that a doubling of CO2 will result in 1 degree C increase (minus any feedbacks). This is just basic physics.

Smokey, if you can produce any peer reviewed paper that demonstrates the MWP caused any of the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, I would love to see it. I am not going to waste time in a WUWT re-education program. I prefer to learn science from qualified scientists.

Clearly WUWT is becoming ever more desperate, promoting this spin to save the “global warming has stopped” meme in the face of, er…more global warming. How else to explain the publishing of a post of such laughable ineptness?

Oregon cites a model-based conclusion that “is computed with a firn diffusion and enclosure model.” Enough with the lame grant-sucking links, OK? Models are not evidence, they are opinion. Try to think for yourself. I can provide a thousand links debunking climate alarmism, but I prefer to do my own debating. [But for those interested in numerous links debunking the CO2=CAGW conjecture, here’s a starting point.]

With about $7.5 billion per year being shoveled into “climate studies”, there is ample motive to use always-inaccurate models to get to the feeding trough. Read The Hockey Stick Illusion, available on the right sidebar, and you will clearly understand how the climate scam operates, who runs it, and who benefits.

And Phil Jones himself falsified the claim that the current rate of temperature rise is anything unusual. But it’s impossible to reason with members of the CO2 Doomsday Cult, any more than we can reason with Mrs Keech’s flying saucer cult, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses; they are all doomsday cults just like yours, with exactly the same kind of true believer acolytes.

The numerous charts and cites I have provided throughout this thread show conclusively that current temperatures are well within Holocene parameters. In fact, we are in the “sweet spot”. Not too hot, not too cold, but ju-u-u-u-st right. Sorry you’re unhappy about the lack of any catastrophe.

The null hypothesis of natural variability has never been falsified. And anyone who believes mass extinctions occur as a result of a 0.7°C rise over a century certainly has a screw loose. True believers can’t see just how silly that sounds to rational folks.

Finally, bgood2creation, you could not possibly have done a fraction of your reading assignment. It is obvious that your mind is closed to any possibility except climate catastrophe — for which there is still no credible evidence. You say you aren’t going to waste your time here. I don’t believe you, but if you’re telling the truth, good luck to you back in your usual echo chamber, which I assume is your cartoonist’s blog. He is your “qualified scientist”?? Please. He’s no more credible than Al Gore. [Notice that scientific skeptics don’t need a “How To” guide to do our thinking for us.]

FYI, this article was written by a well qualified scientist who has forgotten more about the climate than the three of you, plus your cartoonist pal, will ever learn. But you would rather nitpick objections that are only due to your lack of reading comprehension. This article wasn’t written for a journal, it was intended to help regular folks understand that there is nothing unusual happening. Only true believers are frightened of our normal weather.

You could do nothing else than repeat that “models are not evidence” instead than respond to the abundant DATA and EVIDENCE (paleotemperatures, instrumental record, measurements of sea level rise, data from GRACE, etc) that show that you are deadly wrong?

You only show in response incomplete timeseries (such as Greenland temperatures without the last 105 years that warmed a whole 2-4ºC there, temperatures unprecedented in at least 3300 years).

With your personal attacks and complete lack of peer-reviewed references you are showing yourself as a complete willful ignorant individual.

(Willful ignorant: someone that chooses to ignore the evidence for personal convenience)

“Oregon cites a model-based conclusion that “is computed with a firn diffusion and enclosure model.” Enough with the lame grant-sucking links, OK?”

I think you’ve confirmed the conclusion of nearly every commenter above, except for yourself and Henry.

You refuse to respond to data and analysis on climate research produced by hundreds of scientists from around the globe: a Swiss lab in the case you are mocking above.

Or you misrepresent the science to discredit it: Bubble enclosures in polar ice cores represent the only direct record of the paleoatmosphere. A diffusion and enclosure “model” of how gas is trapped in firn ice is used by ice core scientists to determine atmosphere gas concentrations at single time points and to allow comparison of ice core records across different sites.

I suspect if you only accept results from unpaid “scientists” who use no complex “research methods”, you and Henry never need worry about encountering “credible evidence” that might change your mind.

You only need reply, if you will actually read and review the publications I’ve cited above. They are just a few of the hundreds of examples of “credible evidence” of climate change – past, present, and future.

Hi, could someone please explain why Figure 2 looks very different from the end of Figure 3? I understand that there is some smoothing going on, but even so, there doesn’t seem to be a justification for the big dip in Figure 3 at around 1700 or so.

I’m sorry I don’t check here often enough to be a really active part of the conversation.

I *think* I stated before that I did a research project many years ago – it was mainly gathering data from others, I didn’t do any original research on the subject. I don’t have the results handy, but I may have used the original GISP2 data, the dates are about right.

In either case, I do suffer, like most people, from not being able to put enough effort into the fact that the debate isn’t evolving, it’s just spreading. The arguments are the same as they were 15 years ago, just more often.

That’s the most disheartening part, the gigantic waste involved in having the same argument over and over and over and over. Everything seems like that these days, maybe it’s just one of those years.

A couple of people have tried to become “neutral brokers” for the basic facts, but the concept was immediately and dramatically abused in every major case.

It’s sad there’s nowhere that neutral discussion actually takes place – everywhere I’ve been is either “pro or anti” CAGW, the Pro sites delete and ban the Anti visitors, and at the Anti sites the Pro visitors mostly seem to be after blood rather than the facts.

And so, not wanting to contribute to the pile of bodies, I’ll shuffle off to lurker status again.

Yes, the alarmist scientists are trained with grants the same way Pavlov’s dogs were trained with dog biscuits. But cognitive dissonance explains their Cult of Doom acolytes, who wouldn’t know the scientific method if it bit ’em on the ankle. True belief is enough for them.

I enjoy debunking the warmist contingent’s lame arguments because it’s so easy. But this post is no longer on the main page, so I will leave the wild-eyed, arm-waving head-nodders agreeing with each other over their terrifying fear that CO2 will cause climate catastrophe, heh. As if. Sorry 2010 didn’t make the hot list.

For everyone else, I’ll leave you with something that will drive away our cognitive dissonance-impaired friends like the dawn drives away Dracula:

I was given the argument yesterday about the last 10K years being warmer than the current decade to such an extent that this, the warmest decade in the instrumental record, would not rank in the top 9,000 of the last 10K years. After some searching I came across this recent post by Dr. Easterbrook which seemed to be the source of this argument. While looking at the graphs I thought they were odd.

Figure 1: The first one appears to be the instrumental record via some kind of smoothing, but no source is given and it cuts off at 2000. The assignment of “warming” and “cooling” periods seems arbitrary (especially since the overall trend is undeniably upwards), but I’m sure Dr. Easterbrook has some prior assumption that readers here are familiar with the reasoning. I’m not, personally, so an explanation would be helpful.

Figure 2: Cuts off right at 1960, so it’s unhelpful if trying to put late 20th/early 21st century temperatures into context, which is what I thought Dr. Easterbrook was getting at with this.

Figure 3: Again, it cuts off without showing any recent temperatures. In fact it seems to cut off somewhere in the 1800s, so it’s totally unclear what that means for current temperatures except that I happen to know off-hand that the globe has also warmed at least a degree since then, by the instrumental record. This would put the current decade firmly among the warmest periods on that graph, wouldn’t it?
Also, I have no idea why there are horizontal lines around -35 degrees in either this graph or in Figure 2, other than that it’s used to divide the “cool” and “warm” periods. What does it represent? The current temperatures at those sites in Greenland? It’s not clear.

Figure 4: It’s a bit hard to tell what’s going on since it’s so small and pixelated. As for the horizontal line apparently indicating “present temperatures,” see below. Also, apparently it’s Cuffey, not Cuffy.

Figure 5: The last tick on the X axis is 95 years before present, which would seem to put that at 1905. That time was significantly colder than either 1934, 1998, or 2010, so again this graph is misleading if the labels are accurate. But I’ve stumbled across something worse, which Phil caught in his comment above: “Present” for the purposes of Alley’s paper is 1950 (apparently a convention in paleoclimate), and 95 years before that is -1855-. This has been confirmed by Alley himself; the last year in that series is in the middle of the 19th century.
That’s well before we see any of the “modern warming” in the instrumental records, and again we’ve reached a point more than a degree above that by now. The horizontal line showing “present” temperatures is woefully out of date, so much so that I don’t think it’s appropriate to leave this up without a correction explaining the usage of the term and what it means with the graph. Furthermore, I think that taking into account this mistake significantly weakens Dr. Easterbrook’s case regarding the comparison between the recent temperature and the norm over the last 10K years. I don’t think he’s accomplished what he set out to do here; instead it seems he avoided it somehow by never referring to current temperatures in his comparisons.

As a final note, like others before me I’ll question the appropriateness of using a single site in Greenland as context for the average global temperature today. As pointed out before, it sounds unconvincing if we’re also supposed to believe that measurements from 7,000 sites worldwide is insufficient for taking the world’s temperature.

I am going to say this just once more:
if you have read my blog,http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
you would come to understand that my simple basic question to all of you is how much radiative warming and how much radiative cooling is caused by the CO2. As carbon dioxide also takes part in photo synthesis and since this reaction also needs warmth we would also need to know how much cooling is caused here by the CO2. We need all this info to make up a balance sheet, i.e. what is the net effect of the warming and cooling of CO2? Seeing that the CO2 has increased by about 0.01% over the past 50 years, it seems logical for me to expect this info from you in units like
W/m2/m3 air containing 0.01%CO2/unit of time

Now if you claim this info exists and if know how the experiments were done, why not just give the results to me and tell me how the experiments were done?? I have been though all this before with Weart and Alley and now you. I don’t have time anymore for stories.

Not knowing what the exact measured net effect is of the cooling and warming of the CO2, has made me have a look at the pattern of the warming. I have given you the results of two weather stations, one in Spain and one in northern Ireland. Both show no increase in minimum temperatures over the past 50-200 years.

My conclusion is: modern warming is not caused by an increase in GHG’s as otherwise the minumum temps. should have shown an increase (due to the trapping of heat).

You have deliberately chosen not to react to these simple questions and observations. Why then must I further answer to all of your quotes and references? Even if I am all alone, I still have to be faithful to the truth. I will not follow the majority just because you have hundreds of papers and scientists but no one can answer my simple questions and observations…

CO2 is not a pollutant and not a poison. People trying to kill themselves in car exhaust fumes do not die of CO2 poisening. They die because of a lack of oxygen and CO.
If you want more food then more of the carbon dioxide is good.
I cannot help you further. There are none so blind as those who do not want to see.
I can only pray that God will open your eyes.

I almost forgot to give ‘bgood2creation’ the resource he wanted when he asked if I “can produce any peer reviewed paper that demonstrates the MWP caused any of the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, I would love to see it.”

The peer reviewed papers are cited in the article, along with the empirical data used. And for those who throw out a few links as if they somehow settle the issue, note that I’ve provided 800+ peer reviewed links debunking the CAGW conjecture. That is more than the alarmist total in this thread — doubled and squared.

So far, the only response to my request for empirical, testable evidence showing any direct harm to the planet as a result of the increase in CO2 was the Argumentum ad Ignorantium response claiming that “extinctions” were the result. It didn’t take long for that baseless response to be thoroughly deconstructed. If that’s the best you’ve got, then you’ve got nothing.

So how about it, folks? The gauntlet is down. Can you show that the rise in CO2 has caused specific, measurable damage to the planet — damage that cannot be attributed to any other cause? Remember that models are not evidence, and avoid the usual Argumentum ad Ignorantium. Conjecture is also a no-no, and remember the climate null hypothesis, which has never been falsified.

Show us conclusively that increased CO2 has caused measurable, quantifiable global harm. Be specific. After all, that is the central premise upon which the entire “carbon” scare is based.

In fact, CO2 is harmless and beneficial to the biosphere. If it caused global damage, the 40% jump in ppmv — a very substantial increase — would certainly have shown measurable and testable world-wide harm to the planet by now.

But of course CO2 has not caused harm to the planet. It is as essential as H2O. Without CO2 life could not exist. More CO2 is better. The biosphphere is currently starved of CO2. Further, if global temperatures rose another 1°C, it would be entirely beneficial. Immense new tracts of agricultural land would become productive. In a world where one-third of the population is on the edge of starvation, more warmth and more CO2 are a Win-Win for humanity.

So the ball is in your court: show us conclusively that the rise in CO2 has caused measurable, testable harm to the planet, if you can. No models allowed; they are not evidence. No speculative arm-waving, no Argumentum ad Ignorantium. If you can, show that the rise in CO2 is the exclusive cause of specific, quantifiable global damage. Because after all, that is the central claim of the promoters of the CO2=CAGW conjecture.

Good luck. You will be on the short list for a Nobel Prize if you can meet those criteria — which are simply another way of saying: use the scientific method.

I am not sure how many times and by how many people this story (about Greenland’s Holocene history) needs to be debunked before even the hard-core skeptics would concede that it has no merit.

“from Peru” already noted the fallacy that the presentation combines the LOCAL Greenland GISP2 record of the Holocene with the GLOBAL record for recent years.

And “WheelsOC” pointed out very convincingly that the problem with many of the graphs (and specifically the only graph with a reference (GISP2) which is figure 5) stops in 1905.

In other words, none of the (most important) past century temperature record, where AGW would have any effect, is even included in this presentation by Easterbrook.

So how much did the temperature change on Greenland AFTER 1905 ?
Well, not sure about 1905 to present, but we have a very accurate (satellite) record of 1987 to present :

Thus we see that in only 30 years, Greenland warmed 2 – 3 C overall.
Put that number in fugure 5 and you see that temperatures in Greenland are currently WAY above anything we have seen in the past 10,000 years, possibly even the Minoan warming period.

So unless Easterbrook comes up with some evidence that the satellite record is incorrect, OR that 1905 was significantly warmer than 1987 in Greenland, such findings completely destroy the conclusions that Easterbrook draws.

2010 may indeed very well be the warmest year in the Holocene, even when cherry-picking a location (Greenland) that has showed cooling over the past 10k years due to natural (Milankovitch cycles) reduction in solar irradiance.

Rob, again you bring in the M-cycles but you don’t say where we are in each of the 3 cycles and by how much W/m2 the radiation increases or decreases due to each of these. Do you have anything on that?
I also think we must find out exactly what the increase was in warming at the location of sample because there are some places in Greenland that show white. (no warming). Another problem is that large parts of Greenland are elevated – I think the core analysis was taken from a place at 3 km high. I don’t know how that graph of yours was made. I suspect that they may have applied some correction for height – which again could be completely faulty. Furthermore, acc. to your picture graph, it looks like northern Europe and England also increased by the same amount as Greenland, which we know is simply not true. All to do with the “hide the decline” climate gate affair, I am afraid. People’s income on the line and all that..
Sad.
Really.

Regarding the temp record : Actually the UK temps 1987 – 2007 do show a 2 C increase, but I admit that that would be cherry-picked interval, since 1987 was particularly cold across Northern Europe. We don’t know how cherry-picked 1987 was for Greenland. So we are still looking for a sensible graph of Greenland’s temperature increase from the point where Easterbrook left off (around 1900) and today’s Greenland temperatures.

Regarding the Milankovitch cycles, there is a 20 W/m^2 reduction in summer solar irradiance at 65 N over the past 10,000 years. That is very much a part of the story (winter irradiance and precipitation patterns and ocean currents play a major role also), but it certainly explains why Greenland got cooler and not warmer over the Holocene.

Also, not sure why you would bring conspiracy theory issues in (like climategate) or other strawman arguments, since after all the very key problem with this post by Easterbrook is that it focuses on a single spot on the planet (GISP2) while the issue (where 2010 ‘fits’ in the warm years over the Holocene) is about the GLOBAL temperature record.

Rob!
Climategate was very real. You should read up on that. The problem with so many people’s jobs on the line is that you do not know anymore what data you can trust. Where it comes from is important: it must be un-biased.
As stated before, it is not temp. as such, global oftenot, that is important. What is important is average minimum temps. as this would prove man made global warming due to GHG’s.

Looking at a few weather stations from where I could find records which I know I can trust I could not find that minimum temps. have risen significantly over the past 30 years., in line with global warming. That means no heat entrapment and from there it follows that modern warming is not caused by an increase in GHG’s, but it is just natural.

if you have data from other weatherstations that would show otherwise, I will keep an open mind!

If we agree on modern warming being due to natural causes, then there is not much that we can do. It could well be due to one or more of the 3 M-cycles that you mentioned working in tandem that is causing it. I still have to do an investigation on that myself. It could also be due to the output of the sun or some of the factors I mentioned in my bloghttp://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok

Henry@peru
look here:http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data/
J.Storrs Hall mentions here in the beginning that he expects the last century’s missing data to be at least half a degree up, which would bring us to about -31. (current)
If I look at Easterbrook’s last graph (figure 5), that would still leave us at quite a bit below the medeviel warm period. We know this must be true, because Greenland is not yet as green as what we know it was before….(look in the museum in Copenhagen)

The rise is steep but not unprecedented in history (still going by figure 5).
It happened a few times that we see steep rises in temperatures.
We know for sure these rises were definitely not man made.

So what is your argument? I am sure nobody here including Easterbrook is denying that modern warming is happening. The question is: is it natural or is it man made?

Smokey, your understanding of the world is a model built in your head.

Every day, we each modify our internal model of the external world based on past experience, then project possible futures, choose which is more likely, and act. That ability to act based on models is what separates humans from lower life forms that are unconscious of the possible outcomes of their actions.

Every day, every moment, each of is asking “what will happen if …”. If I don’t get up, if I punch my boss, if I run the red light, if I save for retirement. We value models according to how accurate and useful they are. Those individuals, societies, and civilizations whose models yield the best answers are more successful.

Our world is built, run, and guided using shared models. Some are very dependable; others contain hidden flaws. The difference can be unemployment, disaster, and death.

So how accurate and useful are our climate models? We have disagreements on that. But we also have ways to test them.

To me, Hansen’s paper is it’s an impressive for its analysis and its predictions of the future for global temperatures, climate science, and politics. It introduced into the discussion most of the concerns that some critics, such as Smokey, Henry, and Easterbrook, are recognizing only now.

Over the past 30 years, Hansen’s group, and other research groups from around the world, have addressed those concerns in a systematic way, to build our current climate models, constantly testing them for accuracy against new data on past and present climates.

Figures 1, 2, and 3 show the ability of current climate models to explain the last 400,000 years and 60,000,000 years of climate variability, from before the formation of the polar ice sheets to the present day. Past climate changes are only explained if the concentrations of greenhouse gases contained in polar ice cores are included in the model.

From this past record, the contributions (forcings) by different variables to global temperature can be estimated, including changes in solar, albedo, and GHG. See figures 4 and 5.

It is figure 2 that updates Hansen’s concern of 30 years ago, that today, for the first time in the history of the earth, CO2 is forcing global temperatures change far beyond the effect of all other variables.

So we depend on models, as individuals, societies, and civilizations. We use them to build, run, and guide our world. Some are very dependable, preventing conflict, disaster, and death. Others, through hidden flaws, cause those very things.

So how accurate and useful are our climate models? We can test them by how well they explain the past and predict the future.

What were Hansen’s predictions using his model of 30 year ago?

“When should the CO2 warming rise out of the noise level of natural climate variability? … Nominal confidence in the CO2 theory will reach – 85 percent when the temperature rises through the l-sigma level and – 98 percent when it exceeds 2-sigma. … The predicted CO2 warming rises out of the l-sigma noise level in the 1980’s and the 2-sigma level in the 1990’s. ”

So, 30 years ago, Hansen simple climate model including CO2 accurately predicted the global temperature trends of the next two decades. No other scientist or models did that.

Today, Hansen’s more complex climate models extend these predictions 60,000,000 years into the past, into a time before polar ice, and into a similar future after.

What are Hansen’s predictions today (2008)?

“If we stay our present course, using fossil fuels, we will soon leave the climate of the Holocene, the world of prior human history. The eventual response to doubling pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 likely would be a nearly ice-free planet, preceded by a period of chaotic change with continually changing shorelines.”

No one has been a better predictor of climate science or climate politics. Both papers are well worth reading for the accuracy of their models.

Sharkey, models need to be tested for their accuracy and usefulness.

But to reject models is to reject thinking and to reject responsibility.

Oregon, you miss the entire point. I asked someone, anyone, to show empirical [real world] evidence of actual damage to the planet as a result of the increase in the trace gas CO2.

Anyone can invent/fabricate a model showing global anything. And we already have plenty of empirical evidence that the rise in CO2 has been greatly beneficial to the global biosphere.

Now I want physical evidence showing global harm as a direct result of the rise in CO2. Models are tools; they are not evidence. So produce evidence of global damage due directly to the rise in CO2 — if you can. Be prepared to show that CO2 is the direct cause; “what ifs” and implausible chains of inference fail the test. And logical fallacies such as the Argumentum ad Ignorantium used in the claim that extinctions are caused by CO2 fail as well because extinctions have a multitude of causes, and have happened continuously throughout geologic history. Failing to show that extinctions are directly due to the rise in CO2 are an example of the Argumentum ad Ignorantium: “Because I can’t think of another reason, then the cause must be CO2.” Obviously, that line of argument fails. Show us direct cause and effect.

Oregon Perspective says:
January 4, 2011 at 12:43 pm
“But to reject reality is to reject thinking and to reject responsibility.” Fixed it for you. It is funny that the GCMs model the earth as a flat disc. Don’t they call us flat-earthers?

You accuse the climate scientists of “hiding the decline” when Easterbrook hide the INCLINE chopping off the last 105 years of data!

This is selective skepticism at its worst!

Wrong as usual.

Dr Easterbrook did not “chop off” anything. He was using Alley’s data and showing a millennial time scale, as he explained up front.

Your psychological projection is a guilt response to Michael Mann’s deliberately and mendaciously “hiding the decline” by overlaying lines in his Hokey Stick graph. Mann’s mendacity is discussed throughout http://climateaudit.org Just do a search of “Mann” or “Hockey Stick” or “MBH98″, etc. You will see the Mann’s outright deception. There is no comparison with this article by Dr Easterbrook. Your accusation is simply psychological projection in an attempt to cover up Mann’s scientific misconduct.

“Henry@peru
look here:http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data/
J.Storrs Hall mentions here in the beginning that he expects the last century’s missing data to be at least half a degree up, which would bring us to about -31. (current)
If I look at Easterbrook’s last graph (figure 5), that would still leave us at quite a bit below the medeviel warm period. We know this must be true, because Greenland is not yet as green as what we know it was before….(look in the museum in Copenhagen)”

Unfortunately your graph, as the Easterbrook’s one, ends in 1905.

Here is your graph:

Now COMPLETE it with the last 105 years, using the instrumental record in Greenland:

This are not models, this is paleoclimatological and instrumental DATA. And it shows that Greenland is as warm (if not warmer) than the most warm periods of the Holocene (when solar insolation in the Arctic was significantly bigger) and far more warm than in the Medieval Warm Period.

Hansen began his career studying the atmosphere of Venus, where high CO2 rendered the planet uninhabitable. He predicted that the result of increasing CO2 at earth’s distance from the sun would not be as severe.

Do you want to run that experiment to its conclusion on earth? The one habitable planet that we have?

Here’s a prediction from Hansen’s current model, whose human and economic impact we can accuracy assess: “a period of chaotic change with continually changing shorelines”.

NASA satellites now continuously measure changes in ocean heights in response to global warming to an accuracy of millimeters. So far, change in ocean levels match predictions.

Sharkey, do you consider evnetual increases in ocean levels of tens of meters beneficial or catastrophic to the billion humans who currently live there?

And that ignores the consequences to oceanic ecosystems from changes in temperature and depth and to terrestrial ecosystems from changes in temperatures and precipitation.

To me your position is like saying, “What damage have the growth of my cancer cells caused so far? None that I know of. I will only acknowledge that I have cancer and act to prevent it when its symptoms are clearly developed.”

30 years ago, Hansen and others said, “You may have cancer.” Over the past 30 years, cancer specialists around the world have agreed that you very likely do, but that you can reverse its spread at this early stage, if you act quickly.

Many people make your choice, and that’s their right, to live and die as they wish.

But what if it’s your daughter’s cancer? Do you have the moral right to ignore her diagnosis?

Perhaps her cancer will carry her to a better world? In our world, making that decision for her is considered a crime.

When does ignoring the melting of ice, the rising of oceans, and the predicted consequences of our best climate and environmental models become a crime?

“Dr Easterbrook did not “chop off” anything. He was using Alley’s data and showing a millennial time scale, as he explained up front”

The last 105 years of temperatures is missing. If this is no “chopping off” what is it?

“Your psychological projection is a guilt response to Michael Mann’s deliberately and mendaciously “hiding the decline” by overlaying lines in his Hokey Stick graph.”

That was a poor graph, where wrong the tree-ring data were deleted. (And were obviously wrong data, because it differed from the instrumental temperatures)

“There is no comparison with this article by Dr Easterbrook.”

That is true. What Dr Easterbrook has done is much, much worse.

Easterbrook didn’t show the instrumental temperatures, hiding a whole 2-3ºC increase in temperatures. Mann (or more specifically, Mann and Phil Jones) did was not showing the portion where one of the tree-ring proxies diverged from the instrumental (true) temperatures. That was a poor decision. It would have been better to eliminate the series entirely, as it was flawed at least in the last decades.

“Your accusation is simply psychological projection in an attempt to cover up Mann’s scientific misconduct.”

No, mr. Smokey.

Mann did a poor job, and that must be recognized. What Mann did was really stupid, he should have not included the flawed tree-ring series (and that was just one series, many others don’t have the divergrnce problem). That is something I recognize. But what Dr Easterbrook was far worse: he eliminated the Instrumental data, hiding how much has Greenland warmed.

Compare that massacre (What Dr Easterbrook have done is a massacre with trhe data) with the Mann’s “trick”, that “hide” the uncertainty of just one of the many climate proxy series.

This is a monstruos difference. I will not defend the Mann’s poor work, but you are defending something much worse. I admit that things are wrong when they are wrong. You don’t.

“The last 105 years of temperatures is missing. If this is no “chopping off” what is it?”

I feel like I’m trying to teach calculus to a toddler. This has been explained more than once in this thread: the reason the past century can not be used from an ice core is because there is no ice core. Is that not clear enough??

It takes time for snowfall to compress into ice. Get it? No one has an ice core of the past centurey.

OK, about Venus: The first thing you need to understand is that Venus is not Earth. Nor is Mars, which also has a 95% CO2 atmosphere — and is extremely cold year round. But on Earth, CO2 is only a minor trace gas: 0.00039 of the atmosphere.

On Venus and Mars, CO2 is over .95 of the atmosphere. Neither one is remotely comparable to our planet. See here and here.

That takes care of Venus. And Mars. There is no relevant comparison. At all. Now, about the sea level.

Since the glaciers began receding following the last Ice Age, sea levels have been rising. They follow a curve that has nothing to do with changes in carbon dioxide.

3 mm/year is about average since the LIA. Since 1994 the rise has averaged about half of that.

Sea levels are difficult to measure. Over the past century there have been regular cycles riding on a trend. Like everything else, they go in cycles. And different oceans have different [natural] rates of increase.

Willis Eschenback provided this graph, also showing that sea level rise is slowing.

So now we know that CO2 is not causing any harm due to the sea level rising. When you speculate about “ocean levels of tens of meters,” just keep in mind that the planet has already falsified the conjecture that CO2 causes sea levels to rise.

I won’t bother responding to the rest of your comment, because it’s just fear-based emotion. I will stick with supportable facts.

Now that the Venus red herring is deconstructed, and the facts show that sea level is a non-issue, my challenge remains: try to show actual global damage resulting from the rise in CO2. So far, there has been no harm to the planet due to CO2. But I don’t know everything; maybe you can think of a credible, convincing example, now that Venus and sea levels have been debunked.

Hi, could someone please explain why Figure 2 looks very different from the end of Figure 3? I understand that there is some smoothing going on, but even so, there doesn’t seem to be a justification for the big dip in Figure 3 at around 1700 or so.

Peru, you are seriously wrong. The sample point for the ice was much further north in Greenland and here your graphs clearly state: grey= missing data. I thought as much, even before, when Rob brought up the same issue in that picture graph. I don’t know how they could have painted that Greenland was 2-3 up when they had missing data up north and wrong (manipulated) data from Europe.
If what you say were true, then Greenland would be back to what it was in the MWP. That is just not on, if you go by normal history (as explained)….there are paintings and artifacts, remains of churches, etc.
I think the expectation of -31 that Storrs Hall mentioned is more or less correct and you are totally off the mark.
As explained (thanks to Smokey!) the last 100 years is missing because apparently the snow has not yet “icified”
Nobody here is denying that modern warming is not happening.
I note again that you have not answered my question as to what you believe caused modern warming and specifically why you believe that?
I honestly believe that warming is good for the planet as I have never seen forests grow much where it is cold. Don’t you agree? I think we are lucky. I think Storrs Hall mentioned that as well?

Nasa shows the data of the CO2 and the warming but that does not prove a link.
it is the other way: warming causes more CO2 in the air. (a lot of CO2 is dissolved in the oceans and comes out when it gets warmer)
see here: http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/ice-core-graph/
it appears the CO2 comes out of the oceans and increases lags the warming periods by 800 years. Cause and effect, get it? Seeing that you like cancer stories: Smoking causes cancer but cancer does not smoking….or does it?
So you are still missing the point.
We are not denying that modern warming is happening
we just say it is natural
it happened before
many times.
It will happen again after it gets colder first.
Like I said: be happy now
Did you ever see a forest grow where it is cold?

That implies that sea level rise will accelerate as the ice sheet meltdown does. So far in the last decade more than 1 mm/yr of sea level rise come from ice sheets. A decade before that number was close to zero.

And before you say that “sea level rise slowed since 2004″, see the University of Colorado graph again. After a pause during the 2007-2008 La Niña, the trend returned to previous levels, as is evident from the fact that the sea level curve runs parallel to the 1993-2010 trend since 2008.

So as actual global damage due to CO2 we have, for example:

1)accelerating meltdown of Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets.
2)dramatic reduction of summertime Arctic sea ice (30% reduction in extent and 80% reduction in volume)
3)Acceleration of meltdown of Mountain Glacier meltdown, for example the meltdown of the Peruvian glaciers (a thing that directly affects me)
4)The melting of the permafrost in Canada and Siberia, that menaces to liberate huge amounts of carbon stored there as CO2 and methane
5)The proliferation of pine beetle parasites that have killed extensive portions of Boreal Borest in Alaska and Canada
6)Incresing coral bleaching events in the tropical seas as a consecuence of warmer sea surface temperatures

And then is the more straightforward ocean acidification. The oceans acidity has increased by 30% as a consecuence of the reaction:

CO2 + H2O = H2CO3 (carbonic acid)

Then it happens:

H2CO3 = H+ + HCO3-
H+ + CO3– = HCO3-

The resultant reduction in the carbonate ion (CO3–) is very bad news to calcifying organisms such as corals, foraminifera, pteropods, etc. When the carbonate ion concentration drops so that the aragonite saturation state drops enough to approach unity, their shells begin to dissolve.

This is basic chemistry. There is no way that CO2 could not cause this.

So, even if you are right and CO2 doesn’t cause global warming, the ocean will still acidify. The resultant disruption of marine life in a more than enough reason to limit carbon dioxide emissions.

Read and learn, sport. Spouting the repeatedly debunked globaloney about “ocean acidification” is just another talking point coming from the spittle-flecked, wild-eyed Doomsday Cult. It is a baseless scare tactic that scientifically literate people laugh at.

The oceans have an essentially infinite buffering capacity, which means that they will never become acidic, even if the atmosphere was 100% CO2 for millions of years. Read the articles and comments, and the other links. You need to learn about the chemistry and physics before you mindlessly opine — leave opinions like that to Al Gore.

Peru, you are seriously wrong. The sample point for the ice was much further north in Greenland and here your graphs clearly state: grey= missing data. I thought as much, even before, when Rob brought up the same issue in that picture graph. I don’t know how they could have painted that Greenland was 2-3 up when they had missing data up north and wrong (manipulated) data from Europe.
If what you say were true, then Greenland would be back to what it was in the MWP. That is just not on, if you go by normal history (as explained)….there are paintings and artifacts, remains of churches, etc.
I think the expectation of -31 that Storrs Hall mentioned is more or less correct and you are totally off the mark.

As regards to the Co2 reacting with water:
as long as it is warming, more dissolved CO2 will be released from the oceans
(if you know chemistry then you will understand that if you heat a kettle with water, first the CO2 comes out?)
that will decrease the acidity of the oceans
H2CO3=> H2O + CO2
which is what we want.
Are we good?

The additionalCO2 released from the oceans and from our combustion of fossil fuels in the air will be used up quickly by better crops, more greenery, more forests, more marine life, etc.:
earth will be like paradise again!!
more carbon dioxide is good, remember?
Makes me happy.

@Smokey:I feel like I’m trying to teach calculus to a toddler. This has been explained more than once in this thread: the reason the past century can not be used from an ice core is because there is no ice core. Is that not clear enough??

When there is no ice core for “the present,” you do not label 1855’s temperature as “the present” on your graph and mislead people into thinking that 1855’s temperatures reflect 1934’s, 1998’s, or 2010’s temperatures. Easterbrook is seriously, demonstrably in error when he labeled “the present” temperatures on these graphs and consequently his claim about today’s temperatures (“Of the past 10,500 years, 9,100 were warmer than 1934/1998/2010.”) is wrong, no matter how you slice it. Continuing to push this line of argument in the face of these facts is dishonest. Do you disagree?

“Peru, you are seriously wrong. The sample point for the ice was much further north in Greenland and here your graphs clearly state: grey= missing data”

You prefer to use the global average instead of the temperatures recorded by the nearest stations to the GISP2 ice core site?

This is the best information about the temperatures there. You should use them. It will be some error , but much less than if you use the global average. Certainly the Greenland average is far better than the global average.

“for the If what you say were true, then Greenland would be back to what it was in the MWP. That is just not on, if you go by normal history (as explained)….there are paintings and artifacts, remains of churches, etc”

“As regards to the Co2 reacting with water:
as long as it is warming, more dissolved CO2 will be released from the oceans
(if you know chemistry then you will understand that if you heat a kettle with water, first the CO2 comes out?) that will decrease the acidity of the oceans
H2CO3=> H2O + CO2
which is what we want.

But on Earth, the rate of ocean absorbtion of CO2 is far bigger than any degassing due to warming water. The data tell that:

“The additionalCO2 released from the oceans and from our combustion of fossil fuels in the air will be used up quickly by better crops, more greenery, more forests, more marine life, etc.: earth will be like paradise again!!
more carbon dioxide is good, remember?
Makes me happy.”

Keep living in your fantasy world. Dreaming is good for the soul when the reality is nasty… unless you need to act to save yourself… in that case, your delusion can kill you…

the thing that I am sure about is that modern warming is not caused by CO2.
because
1) actual lab. test results proving warming properties show that CO2 is a very, very weak green house gas, when tested at the relevant concentration range.
2) we donot know exactly how much cooling is caused by the CO2 in the atmosphere, but purely by looking at the spectra of CO2, over the whole of the wavelength area from 0 to 15 um, I would say that it is pretty much evens with the warming and cooling of CO2.
3) we donot how much energy is being used by photo synthesis (do we?)but it is logical for me to expect that the cooling caused by CO2 taking part in photo synthesis on its own cancels out any warming due to a weak green house gas effect.

that leaves me to expect a net effect of close to zero warming or cooling due to CO2 increasing.

and that leaves modern warming being due to
a) natural causes
b) man made causes other than carbon dioxide
c) a) + b)

Because if any of you like Peru and Oregon P and Rob were to prove to me that modern warming must be man made, as such enormous warming now witnessed has never been observed in the past before,

then I would rather point to another cause:
water vapor

because
1) it is a much stronger green house gas
2) every process we use releases water vapor, including nuclear, hydro, rocket fuel, fossil fuel, etc.
3) it is logical for me to expect that water vapor has been increasing a lot due to human activities in terms of percent per unit of volume per unit of time, even if eventually it does end up in the oceans again

Peru says
Keep living in your fantasy world. Dreaming is good for the soul when the reality is nasty… unless you need to act to save yourself… in that case, your delusion can kill you…

Was it not in Peru where many people froze to death last winter?
so who is dreaming?

because
coming back to my previous post

you guys were still going to prove to me that modern warming is caused by an increase in GHG’s
e.g. do you have minimum temp. data from the weather stations in your countries that show an increase in line with modern warming? Or is it only max. temperatures that increased in your countries?

HenryP,
You manage to get GHG theory completely wrong, you get ocean acidification due tp CO2 increase completely backward, and when faced with the instrumental temperature record for Greenland you defend yourself stating that the instrument was not at the same spot as the GISP2 core drill, and thus we should take the global record instead ?

I’m completely mystified by your thinking process. Where did you get the idea that CO2 has no effect on the planet’s temperature ? And that the oceans would gas out CO2 because of warming ?

When you hold an opinion like that which are scientifically laughable and also contradict what every climate scientist (including skeptics) tell us, then don’t you at least verify your assertion ? Do you read such things in a blog ? Did you not study at least a little bit of study yourself ? Like some radiative transfer theory (for the GHG effect), or some chemistry (for ocean acidification) ?

When your belief is so strong that you can’t even acknowledge basic scientific facts, the I’m sure you will not accept the fact that Easterbrook left out the past century 2-3 C warming in the Greenland area, and that Easterbrook’s conclusions are therefore false.

But where is your proof from the instrumental records of temperatures that shows that GHG’s are the cause of modern warming? I would like to see that. No one here has answered that question. Remember, it is the average minimum temps. that must show the warming trend (the trapping of heat by the GHG’s)

of the data from two stations that I observed, both did not show the modern warming trend, if you look at average minimum temps.

“When there is no ice core for ‘the present,’ you do not label 1855′s temperature as ‘the present’ “.

That is nothing but amateur nitpicking.

How many times does it need to be explained to you that the article is a discussion of millennial time frames? ± a century out of millennia is acceptable, and completely understandable – for those who understand what is being explained. You still don’t seem to understand that there is no ice core evidence for the past century. That is because the snow has not yet compacted into ice.

Criticizing someone for not including a non-existent ice core means you are either slow to learn, or a troll. Try thinking in terms of millennia, and it will all become clear. Or keep trolling, whatever.

I am looking for a reference that shows that Co2 was much higher in the far, far past.
I remember vaguely reading about it somewhere, was it in the Cambrium period? many millions of years ago? was it not like a few thousands of ppm?

is there anyone who can help me with that reference? was it also from an ice core analysis record?

How many times does it need to be explained to you that the article is a discussion of millennial time frames? ± a century out of millennia is acceptable, and completely understandable – for those who understand what is being explained. You still don’t seem to understand that there is no ice core evidence for the past century. That is because the snow has not yet compacted into ice.

“Thus, regardless of which year ( 1934, 1998, or 2010) turns out to be the warmest of the past century, that year will rank number 9,099 in the long-term list.” Is Dr. Easterbrook factually correct when he says this? Is this supported by his data at all?

“So where do the 1934/1998/2010 warm years rank in the long-term list of warm years? Of the past 10,500 years, 9,100 were warmer than 1934/1998/2010. Thus, regardless of which year ( 1934, 1998, or 2010) turns out to be the warmest of the past century, that year will rank number 9,099 in the long-term list.”

So he is making a conclusion about the last decade (leaving aside 1934, that was near record warm only in the US) by comparing the 1998-2010 temperature to a paleoclimate record that ends in 1905.

The 1905 temperature is a lot cooler than the warm periods in the Holocene as shown by the GISP2 ice core drill. This tell us NOTHING about the temperatures in 1998-2010.

Yet Dr. Easterbrook claims that “Of the past 10,500 years, 9,100 were warmer than 1934/1998/2010″. To say this, one must be either completely incompetent or completely dishonest.

The conclusion:

“The climate has been warming slowly since the Little Ice Age (Fig. 5), but it has quite a ways to go yet before reaching the temperature levels that persisted for nearly all of the past 10,500 years.”

Is quite false, as is based in a graph that ends 105 years ago. This is “hiding the incline” at its worst!

“you guys were still going to prove to me that modern warming is caused by an increase in GHG’s e.g. do you have minimum temp. data from the weather stations in your countries that show an increase in line with modern warming? Or is it only max. temperatures that increased in your countries?”

I have something better: global average temperatures in the daytime vs nightime:

You see the fingerprint of Greernhouse warming: nights (minimum temperature) warming faster than days (maximum temperature), so that the diurnal temperature range (DTR), defined as difference between TMAX and TMIN, decreases.

You could see that in the 1958-1985 period of flat mean global temperatures, the nighttime temperatures increased while the daytime temperatures decreased (aech offsetting the other), consistent with a greenhouse warming caused by the CO2 (that tends to increase nightime temperatures more than dayttime temperatures) and aerosol cooling caused by SO2 emissions (that reflect sunlight back to space, cooling days but not nights).

You could see that in 1985-2002 the aerosol cooling reversed, consistent with the fact that clean air regulations reduced SO2 emissions but not CO2 emissions. And finally, you see that nightime temperature warming was faster in 1985-2002 than in 1958-1985, consistent with the fact that greenhouse gas forcing has increased in recent times.

As I mentioned before here , it seems that here on WUWT there are still many people that do not understand (or do not want to understand) the basic physics of GHG theory, otherwise arguments like you present would not be an issue.

As you looking for “proof”, in general there is no such thing as “proof” in science. There is just mountains of evidence supporting theory. Also we do not have a second planet Earth to experiment with, so we can only show that 20th century warming (especially from the past 40 years) makes sense if the physics of GHG theory are correct, and does not make sense if the physics of GHG theory are incorrect.

Now, if those results for Tmax and Tmin had been the other way around or at least equal to each other, you would have a good point. All it shows now is that more heat came in which simply has to linger longer. Do you get that?
So this is exactly confirming what I have observed myself when analysing the results of those two stations in Spain and Northern Ireland. Thanks!
Minimum temperatures do not follow exactly the same line as modern warming.
That de-bunks your theory that modern warming is due to increases in GHG’s, more especially that it is due to the CO2.
More CO2 is good.http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok

From Peru: Thank you, but again I must clarify that the last data in the core study is from the year 1855, not 1905. The last bar on the graph is “95 years before present,” and in this data “present” is used in a paleoclimate convention to mean the year 1950, as with radiocarbon dating (Smokey might wish to take note so that he can avoid “amateur” mistakes). Dr. Alley confirmed this to Hot Topic’s Gareth Rowenden via email (I double-checked before making my first post in the thread).
There might not even be a significant difference temperature-wise between 1855 and 1905, and either way Dr. Easterbrook is still wrong to draw the conclusions he does. But to put this in perspective, the most recent layer from this data series was already 30 years old by the time Marty McFly rescued Doc Brown from Mad Dog Tannen.

If Dr. Easterbrook considers this ice core data to be representative of global temperatures (and why would he use them otherwise?), then he should consider that the world has warmed significantly since 1855 and that all three years of his interest (1934, 1998, 2010) are between two and three degrees C higher than the marker he drew. That puts them among the top percentiles of temperatures during the last 10K years according to this ice core data. “Hiding the incline,” indeed.
For the benefit of Smokey, we’re not accusing him of chopping off any years from the ice core series (that would be impossible, the chopping was done for him), we’re pointing out that he isn’t including any data on the three years he wants to say are so cold compared to the ice core record.

I have 35 years of experience in Chemistry, are you telling me I simply don’t know what i am talking about?
Rob, if you have respect for the Truth, then keep away from Sceptical Science:
they kept on wiping my arguments away.
I am warning you not to continue to tell people that the Co2 is not good.
Eventually the truth will come out. It always does.

Now, if those results for Tmax and Tmin had been the other way around or at least equal to each other, you would have a good point. All it shows now is that more heat came in which simply has to linger longer. Do you get that?”

In both Tmin increases more than Tmax, a clear signature of greenhouse warming.

The “relative change” is the change in TREND (not temperatures) between those two periods. The Tmax trend increases more than Tmin trend because for Tmax the aerosol-induced cooling trend of 1958– 1985 switches to brightening+greenhouse induced warming trend of 1985– 2002, unlike Tmin, that show a warming trend in both periods.

Henry@peruhttp://www.arm.ac.uk/preprints/445.pdf
Here is a paper where you can see the actual data and where I know I can rely on its accuracy.
look carefully at fig. 8
There is no trend of rise in Tmin
Same for that station in Spain.
I will still find others, I will still get to the truth. Try to avoid showing me papers from East Anglia…or Virginia…
don’t you have one for Peru?

henry@peru
Did you not see that the trend in the TMin line is exactly the same as the trend of the Tmax line? How you get proof of GHG warming out of that one is a mystery to me.
if you want to quote, here is the conclusion:
In spite of the current warmer conditions, annual mean temperatures still remain within the range seen in the previous two centuries.
In the period of overlap, 1865–2002, we note that the features seen in the Armagh series are closely paralleled by features in the Northern Hemisphere mean temperature (Jones et al., 2001). The mid-19th century warm period, which is also seen in the central England series, has received relatively little attention.
It is important to establish the reality of such 19th century warmings, because that century is frequently used as a baseline for modelling the 20th century climate. A baseline at the end of the 19th century, when conditions were noticeably cooler, would exaggerate the subsequent warming in the 20th century.

I found some data here nearby in Pretoria, going back to 1973. We know that the dry months here are from May to September, so I am only going toput those data together.
Or would you say to rather look at the wet months?

for the month of May in every year from 1974 to 2010
(May is generally a dry month here in Pretoria )
Amazing results:
(pity it does not want to copy the graph out of excel here now)
The trend of the mean is absolutely flat
The (linear) trendline on maximum temps. is slightly up
The (linear) trendline of minimum temps. is slightly down.

So what does that tell you?
Unfortunately no global warming as a result of an increase in GHG where I live, I am afraid.

I did it again. All the results I find or get, always point to global warming due to reasons other than GHG warming. Like I said, the carbon dioxide is not your problem…

WheelsOC wrote :
“From Peru: Thank you, but again I must clarify that the last data in the core study is from the year 1855, not 1905. The last bar on the graph is “95 years before present,” and in this data “present” is used in a paleoclimate convention to mean the year 1950, as with radiocarbon dating (Smokey might wish to take note so that he can avoid “amateur” mistakes). ”

Thank you for the correction WheelsOC.
I am not sure if there is any instrumental data dating back to 1855, but since Greenland was just getting out of the LIA at that time, I would be surprized if the temperature difference between 1855 to present would be less than than 2-4 C that Greenland experienced during the 1905 – present period.

Either way, this clearly shows, as “from Peru” already mentioned, that Easterbrook is “hiding the incline” at its worst. 2010 is likely to be the warmest in the Holocene, even in the cherry-picked location of Greenland.

For Henry:
You mention that you have 35 years of experience in Chemistry, but in your blog you fail to mention that a 30% increase in CO2 causes a (30%) increase in ocean acidification (Hydrogen ions) in the ocean. You only mention ‘outgassing’ of CO2 due to warmer oceans (which by the way assumes that warming is happening) and fail to mention that observations confirm ocean acidification consistent with our CO2 emissions.

Second, in you blog you mention a “CO2 cooling” effect due to the 5um CO2 absorption bands, but fail to mention that the sun does not radiate much energy in 5um, and on top of that, if CO2 would absorb that energy that it would cause warming of the troposphere (since CO2 absorbs in that band).

Now I’m sure that you “know what you are doing” as you state, but you did not provide any evidence to show that you are actually interested in doing science instead of politics.
Please update your blog with scientific evidence to your assertions (of CO2 cooling and ocean de-acidification), not to mention your remark that skepticalscience.com continues to “wipe your arguments away”. Until then, your reference to a recent FOIA by a “climate skeptics think tank” (American Tradition Institute) is very indicative of your motives and agenda. The truth is already out there.

Either way, this clearly shows, as “from Peru” already mentioned, that Easterbrook is “hiding the incline” at its worst. 2010 is likely to be the warmest in the Holocene, even in the cherry-picked location of Greenland.

So Rob,

Are you not happy that it is warming?
Did you ever see a forest grow where it is very cold?
Don’t you like to see more more greenery?
I showed you that warming is not happening as a result of the CO2. That is clear from all the results I can find.http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok

Rob,
to all of your points,
1) All the results show it is warming, I did not dispute that. I say that it is not the carbon dioxide doing it.
2) If it is warming then the net effect will be that more CO2 is released from the oceans and the oceans will get less acid: H2CO3=>CO2 + H2O. This is good.
3) CO2 is not only cooling at between 4-5 but also has absorptions 1.6-2,3. Even some UV absorptions. Look how they are able to measure this radiation on earth as it bounces back from the moon. So it went from sun-earth-moon-earth. (see comments in my blog). And then how much is it cooling also because of photo synthesis?
4) I know what I am doing and I have proved it again in my previous posts here. Stay with Sceptical Science if the truth is not dear to you.

If this is your life’s work then I understand that you are disappointed. Unfortunately I cannot change the truth. There must be a reason God wanted me to investigate this.
I was like you, 100% with Al Gore. Now I feel a bit like Noah. Sorry, the flood about this hoax is going to come. Better be prepared.

I just finished reading this very interesting article by Dr. Easterbrook. His charts show very clearly that these temperatures have happened before over and over.

Many thanks to Dr. Anthony Watts for bringing so many scientists to a much wider audience. This is by far the best site for climate discussion. It’s so essential that I’ve already set WUWT as my home page!

I have a stupid question about ice core analysis. Looking down through the layers, is it possible to pick up the condition whereby warming was so large for a given period that it completely melted away snow from those years and is therefore not there to be counted?

@HenryP: So, you say that J. Storrs Hall was also wrong by asserting that things have been a lot warmer in the past and that the current warming ‘hockey stick’ is dinky compared to what happened in history?
Having read over that post, yes it seems he is making much of the same mistakes as Dr. Easterbrook (even getting the dates wrong, as Nick Stokes and Willis Escherbach point out in the comments). Not only did he describe (what he though was) 1905’s temperatures as “today’s”, he even forgot to take into account that “years before present” is “years before 1950.”
I’m left wondering why actual paleoclimate people aren’t being sought to make posts that explain Greenland’s temperature history for the benefit WUWT readers, instead of having a retired geologist and a nanotechnologist both make guest posts here, and both get it very wrong (in much the same way, even). In fact, since these very same errors have been pointed out repeatedly before, why isn’t Anthony discussing it with the authors or in the comments?
In addition, Hall totally leaves out a graph of the modern warming trend as revealed by the instrumental data instead of giving both sets of data a graphical comparison. If he wants to say that the current “hockey stick” is not unprecedented, he may want to actually work with the graphs and show it.

Well Henry, I didn’t realize the weather in Pretoria, South Africa = global average temperature, or that 1 weather station > 7,000 globally-distributed stations. This, of course, changes everything.
I mean, if the climate has been basically the same for that one station in Pretoria, South Africa for the last 36 years, clearly the other 99.9999999999999% of the globe follows suit. It’s all so clear to me, now. Thank you for showing me the error of my ways.

Henry@Wheelsoff
It appears you have not read the report until the end!
Did you understand what I did?
Clouds are important. it is all in the clouds.
if more heat comes to earth then you get more clouds and that brings everything back to zero.
So what we call “weather” is really God’s way of keeping the temperature of our planet stable.
Otherwise we’d all melt in the heat or be frozen in the cold.
But if you want to see if global warming is happening my thinking was that you must eliminate those clouds
and “weather” in general
because they are going to cause serious scattering, especially if it occurs at night in winter.
The results you get, will then become dependant on how long those clouds linger,
which, from one day when compared to the same day (on the calendar) exactly one year ago, may be very much different,
if your place of measurement on earth is constant.

I was expecting you to come up with your weather stations comparing dry and cloudless days – during the past 50 years when we had this enormous increase in CO2 but obviously you are not interested in finding out what the truth is in your own area.

In the meantime, the trees and the plants have been talking to me. They all said they want more warmth and more food (carbon dioxide)
So who is the real man standing up for the environment?

HenryP said :
“I have been through my posts and I definitely cannot see where I said something political that could possibly described me as being “rightwing” “.

Not surprising Henry, because I never suggested that you are “rightwing”. So you made that up all by yourself. I did however suggest that you “update your blog with scientific evidence to your assertions (of CO2 cooling and ocean de-acidification)”, which you have not done yet.

HenryP said: “the trees and the plants have been talking to me”. That’s very nice Henry, but maybe you could sustain that perception with some scientific evidence as to the response of trees and plants to our CO2/methane emissions, forest destruction and land-use changes. I’m sure you will find (as most biologists do) that trees in the real world experience more severe constraints than CO2 limits. For example, you will find that CO2 increases enables weeds to grow more vigerously, while trees suffer due to water constraints. And that changes in the climate and aquatic environment cause annihilation of a massive amount of species that cannot adapt to the rapid changes we are imposing on them. So much that biologists are already naming our era as the “Holocene extinction event”.

We should realize that science is the ONLY objective method by which we can judge our own actions. So get the science right at the very least…. Please adjust your blog.

I share your faith in God, and the responsibility of humans to take care of all creatures that share this planet with us. But what I see is that our actions (including burning millions of years worth of fossil fuels) is seriously disrupting to our planet’s eco systems and is already causing great stress on this planet’s living species, including record numbers of extinctions. Not to mention the damage that we will cause when our carbon emissions will increase uncontrollably.

It is time that we face our responsibility as expressed in every major religion that we hold, and minimize the harm that we impose on all the millions of species that share this planet with us. Time to show our children and grandchildren that we stand by our belief that we are the caretakers of this planet, and not the undertakers.

I have had two kids, and when they were small they were quickly able to communicate to me if they wanted warmth, food or love
Now I have two dogs, and somehow they are also able to do exactly the same.
yesterday, the plants and trees in the garden talked to me.
They said they really wanted more warmth and more food (carbon dioxide)
but now we have thousands and thousands of people including yourself who believe
– or who have been made to believe \ (brainwashed) –
that global warming and carbon dioxide is bad

So I am the only one, really, and a few here at WUWT, who is standing up for the environment.
Don’t think that you can continue to lie about the goodness of the carbon dioxide for the environment and the grace of God for you will just continue to increase to cover the sin of speaking untruths. It does not work that way.

Obviously I am for the environment and everything. We need more living space for animals. We need to take a stand against people taking the habitats of the animals.
BTW, do you know what caused the glacier in Kilimanjaro to retreat? Unfortunately, this is Africa and here they just cut the wood of the trees if they need to cook or get warm. Do you think that is better than coal? I think it is better to give them electricity from gas or coal and then filter out the sulphurs and heavy metals?
(3rd generation power stations)
this is an important debate for AFRICA and INDIA, you must tell them that it is OK to put more CO2 in the air.
God bless you
if you do

Umm, 1934 was the warmest year in the continental United States. Not on the planet.

Climate science reports average global temeratures. Land and Ocean. Over the whole planet. The United States is , what, 5% of the earth’s surface? It’s not a measure of average global temperature trends. Most warming, as I understand it, occurs over ocean regions and polar regions.

yes we are asking people to check their local weather station (where they live) to see if it has been warming over the past 30-50 years when we had this massive increase in the carbon dioxide. In my home town mean temps. have not changed and minimum temps. have been decreasing which refutes the theory of global warming being due to an increase in GHG’s

I haven’t heard of the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, a plethora of other highly reputable scientific organizations with umimpeachable credibility. Every single one of them says there’s a global trend upward in temperatures. Every reputable scientific organization on the planet acknowledges that pumping more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will – with a high degree of scientific certainty = affect climate and temperature – sometimes in good ways, as you suggest, but mostly in bad ways.

Asking anonymous people on the internets to check their local weather stations is hardly sound science. Gathering and analyzing representative data on regional trends takes an effort by trained people and an extraordinary amount of rigourous technical work. Otherwise, we wouldn’t need to train people for eight to ten years in college to do scientific work. Do anonymous people on the internets know how to do trend analysis, and rigorous study in accordance with established scientific methodology.

Its not plausible that Global climate and global temperature trends can be scientifically analyzed posting some website nobody’s every heard of, and asking untrained people to look at some local weather stations. That’s not science.

Well Peter X(?) if you had read and understood my report you would have figured out that there is something worrying about it, but it is opposite as of what you think it is or should be. If you can figure out what worries me about my own report you are a genius.
In the meantime, there is confimation of my observation that GHG’s do not cause warming, first of all when you look at my own summary of all of my investigations,http://letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
(note that South-Africa< Spain < Northern Ireland are on one line covering the whole of earth and minimum temps. have not been increasing here in line with modern warming)
but there was also a lot of it here on WUWT. I suggest you keep up to date with it, so it won't hit you one day like Noah's flood did to most of compatriots.

Good luck getting your study published in a reputable scientific journal.

I don’t put much stock in “data” posted on obscure websites I’ve never heard of, submitted by random anonymous people with on the interwebs allegededly studying their local weather stations, with no way of knowing if the data is representative, robust, or if the anonymous internet posters “analyzing” the data have the foggiest clue what the F they are doing.

This post was really poorly written!
Already in the first sentence, the post stumbles and fall:
“1934 has long been considered the warmest year of the past century. A decade ago, the closest challenger appeared to be 1998, a super-el nino year, but it trailed 1934 by 0.54°C (0.97°F).”

No, this is not true. It is true that 1934 was as warm as 1998 FOR THE CONTIGOUS USA – NOT THE WHOLE WORLD!!!
How long shall we continue to read this rubbish!
And furthermore, 1998 did not trail 1934 by half a degree! However, the 1969-1990 average is trailing 1934 by 0.54 degrees.
To me, it looks like the author has problems with getting basic numbers right.

Then it continues with a bizarre statement:
“The last phases of the strong 2009-2010 el nino in early 2010 made this year another possible contender for the warmest year of the century.”

HELLO!! WAKE UP!! We’ve entered a new century – in fact a new millenium! And it actually happened more than 10 years ago! 1934 and 2010 does NOT belong to the same century. A person that haven’t even noticed this cannot possibly be trustworthy in climate issues..

After this disaster, it gets perhaps even worse, as there are a lot of figures that supposedly should show that it has been a lot warmer before. However, except that the scale seems to be different in each figure, the figures are comparing earlier temperatures from the top of the Greenland glacier with global surface temperatures (Fig. 1).

I’ll try to take you thruogh the graphs:
In Fig. 1, we see that the end of the 20th century was about 0.5 degrees warmer than the 1960s, and 0.8 degrees warmer than at the start of the 20th century.
Ok. So far, so good.

Then we start looking at the temperature at Greenland in Fig. 2., and this is where we hit into trouble… Except that the figure ends in 1960 (in the middle of a cold spell), we see that the temperature, represented by the oxygen ratio, shows a value of ~-34 in the 1920s. We know that it is as warm on Greenland today as it was then, so one would suspect the values to be about the same today. Note that this also clearly shows that the variability at Greenland deviates from the global variability.

Then we look into longer time-series in Fig. 3., and now it gets totally confusing!!
In this figure, the time-series ends at the start of the 20th century (why??), and from the values, we see that the value of almost -34 in 1920 (and hence, also today’s value), that would actually have been “all time high” in the 5000 year time-series. But still, we are left with the impression that it was by far warmer some thousand years ago, than it is today. How come?

In the last two figures, we get a 10.000 year time-series, showing that the temperatures have mostly been on the warmer side for the last 10.000 years, but with substantially lower temperatures in the last few hundred years. However, we see that the temperatures were slightly higher several thousand years ago compared to a few thousand years ago – BUT: according to the values in figure 2 put into figure 3, the temperatures in 1920 BY FAR exceeded the temperatures a few thousand years ago – and we know that it is as warm today as it was in the 1920s, which means that today’s temperature EXCEED the temperatures several thousand years ago!

If you didn’t fall down on the same conclusion, you are, however, excused: The last two figures show temperature and not oxygen ratio, so the scale must not be confused with the scale of the earlier figures! But from the conclusion that we deduce from the first figures, it is clearly seen that the temperature around 1920 must have been the “highest on record”, and hence, also today’s temperature must rank as “all time high”!

Of course, one issue is the different smoothing in each of the time-series.
Thanks to the author for not discussing this!

This post was really poorly written!
Already in the first sentence, the post stumbles and fall:
“1934 has long been considered the warmest year of the past century. A decade ago, the closest challenger appeared to be 1998, a super-el nino year, but it trailed 1934 by 0.54°C (0.97°F).”

No, this is not true. It is true that 1934 was as warm as 1998 FOR THE CONTIGOUS USA – NOT THE WHOLE WORLD!!!

No Vidar, it seems you have been drinking?

“have the author been drinking”? where are you from?
“Contigous?” What’s that?

[it’s hard to see how calling someone a drunkard adds to the debate . . make your point by all means but trashing someone with whom you disagree is not helpful . . thank you]

Earlier in the thread, we discussed the paper that you are quoting , noting that where the sample came from in Greenland it is marked grey: no data available
In your last quoted graph they clearly say that the average rate of increase from 1840 to 2010 was 0.07 degrees C per decade> if you add this to Easterbrooks graphs you can see that we are still well below MWP or the RWP and others. We know that in those days people were not using fossil fuels?
Anyway, remember my results in Pretoria (dry winter months) during the past 37 years?
Means temps. o.o degrees C/decade (no change)
Max. temps. rising at a rate of 1.0 degrees C /decade
Min. temps. decreasing at a rate of 0.35 degreesC/ decade

I have now also looked at La Paz, Bolivia which apparently is also dry in winterhttp://www.tutiempo.net/en/Climate/La_Paz_Alto/06-1974/852010.htm
for the past 37 years
My finding is:
Mean temps. going down at a rate of 0.25 degrees C/decade
Max. temps. increasing at a rate of 0.5 degrees C/decade
Minimum temp decreasing at a rate of 0.35 degrees C/decade

Interesting?
this is all happening when CO2 is rising at its fastest rate.
It is alleged that the rise in Co2 traps heat.
We are agreed that if warming is as a result of an increase in GHG’s we must see minimum temps. rising at a rate faster than max and means?
Well, that is not happening. Accept it. People do not cause warming. If need be, find another job. You can always join us.